New Mobile Report: Shooting Stars
by Chris Ganale
Summary: In the distant future, mankind has reached the stars. UESA rules the colonies with an iron fist. Those who oppose them, die. The only hope for peace is five pilots and their legendary MS, Gundam. Now a full crossover: GundamW, LH, Negima, Full Metal Panic
1. Prologue: Episode Zero

_In the distant future, mankind has left behind its homeworld of Earth to begin a new life in space colonies. However, the monopolistic United Earth Sphere Alliance, backed by the military might of the mysterious OZ organization, has subjugated the people of the colonies with the use of massive humanoid battle weapons known as Mobile Suits._

_Led by OZ's Specials forces, the Alliance has blockaded the colonies, enforcing their iron rule with deadly force against any who dare oppose them. With the colonies firmly under their control, the Alliance turned its attention to the production of newer and deadlier models of Mobile Suits, utilizing the colonies' resources and population as a source of forced labor._

_The space colonists, fed up with the oppressive grip of the Alliance, have secretly begun construction of five advanced Mobile Suits known as Gundams, to be sent down to Earth and recovered by five specially-trained pilots, where they would then wage a guerilla war against the oppressive Alliance and secretive OZ._

_The year is After Colony 195. Operation Meteor. With the colonies' last hope for freedom riding on the backs of the five Gundams and their pilots, humanity's greatest battle is about to get underway…_

_

* * *

_**A/N:** The insane crossover bastard strikes again. This'll start making sense as to why it's in this section in the first actual chapter, or rather episode.


	2. Episode 1: Operation Meteor

Warning klaxons blared in an abandoned hangar in the L1 colony cluster. A handful of technicians made their way toward the pressure door exits, securing tools and anything else that could possibly become hazardous upon the depressurization of the hangar. The harsh, white artificial lights died out, casting the hangar into darkness as the depressurization procedures continued. The heavy tang of vernier fuel hung in the air, accompanied by the warm-up hum of engines.

In the cockpit slung beneath the body of the high-speed shuttlecraft, the pilot went over the final preflight systems checks, feeding power into the engines, weapon systems, and atmospheric heat shield. On the ground below the cockpit, a white-haired man with mechanical eyes, a three-fingered right hand, and a cane in his left hand stared up at the pilot.

"Once you reach Earth, I'll contact you from time to time concerning targets for you to destroy."

"I understand," the pilot's feminine voice replied, her right hand testing the resistance of the main cannon's targeting stick. It was all information she already knew anyway, so she had no real reason to pay her controller any mind.

"Your main objective is the destruction of OZ targets and the avoidance of civilian casualties," the man continued, "but your absolute highest priority is to protect yourself and your mission, at all costs."

"Roger," she answered tonelessly. Letting go of the control levers, she brought up both hands to pull her long, light brown hair into a bun, then secure it in place with a rubber band. She picked up her helmet from her lap and lowered it over her head, sealing it to the neck of her flight suit.

"_Operation Meteor will commence in one minute,"_ a voice said over both the cockpit intercom and the speakers in the hangar. _"Doctor J, please clear the area so we can finalize launch preparations."_

"Hmph, I'm coming already," the labcoat-clad man, Doctor J, replied. As he started to walk away, he looked up one last time at the pilot strapped into her cockpit chair above him. "Good luck, Narusegawa."

The pilot's only reply was to tap the button to close and seal her cockpit from the outside world. As the doctor disappeared from view, the inner cockpit hatch sealed in place, followed moments later by the outer, heavily-armored hatch. Darkness filled the cockpit, broken only by the glow of her instrument panel.

Her internal viewscreens came online, one mounted directly in front of her, and two to either side. They currently displayed a one-hundred-eighty degree view of the darkened hangar.

"_Hangar depressurization commencing."_

There was no sound of air rushing out of the chamber as it depressurized, the soundproof cockpit easily blocked it out. The only thing she heard was the slight creaking of the shuttle's hull as it adjusted to the change in pressure. She reached forward, queuing up the power to the engines, and waited.

"_Launch tunnel deploying."_

A slight tremor ran through the shuttle as hydraulic lifts lowered the section of hangar that the shuttle rested on, down through the floor, and into open space. As the vista of stars burst into view on her viewscreens, she couldn't help but marvel at the beauty of it.

From where she sat, magnetically-attached to a secret launch platform extended from the side of the L1 colony, she felt like she could see the entire universe. All around her, hundreds of thousands of stars shined at her, unblinking due to the lack of atmosphere. Larger, moving points of light marked the locations of shuttles or Alliance Mobile Suits on deployment and the even bigger, static spots were other colonies.

And there, directly ahead of her, its mass darkening a large portion of the sky, was her target, Earth. She couldn't make out any distinguishing features due to the fact that she was on the planet's night side, but she could see the glimmering nighttime lights of the cities on her side of the planet, sparkling like jewels on a black velvet stand.

She had been to Earth, once, when she was two years old, but the memory of where she had gone and what she had done were not something she could pull from the recesses of her mind. As far as she was concerned, this would be her first trip to the mother planet. She couldn't wait.

And then reality intruded on her pleasant utopia, in the form of the voice from before, _"Releasing magnetic locks. Commence, Operation Meteor!"_

Her hands acted instinctively, a result of years of training. As the heavy thumps of the magnetic locks disengaging reached her, she engaged the vernier engines at full power, rocketing toward Earth on an autopilot course. The heavy acceleration pushed her back into her seat, but she slowly settled out as she became acclimated to the speed.

No Alliance Mobile Suit could hope to catch up to her, and none of their defense emplacements could track her. From now until the time she began her orbital descent, she was well and truly safe, cast adrift in her own world.

Releasing her grips on the control levers, she leaned back into her seat, laid her hands in her lap, and closed her eyes, relishing in the feeling of finally, truly flying after those years in simulators. Before long, a blissful sleep rose up to enfold her in its comfortable embrace.

---

In low Earth orbit, a civilian diplomatic shuttle on a return flight from the L1 colony cluster maneuvered into position to descend into the atmosphere. Firing breaking thrusters, the shuttle brought up its nose as it oriented itself in the proper glide path to avoid incineration.

Inside the passenger cabin, a young woman with long, dark brown hair pulled back into a braid gazed out the window at the planet rising up below. She cupped her chin in her left hand, resting her elbow on her chair's armrest as she stared out at the blue-and-green ball turning lazily below the shuttle.

A uniformed Alliance soldier drifted up to her row, floating easily in the low gravity within the cabin, and stopped himself by grabbing the headrest of an unoccupied seat nearby. "We're making the descent into the atmosphere now, Vice Foreign Minister Otohime," the soldier said.

Seated next to the girl, an older man in a business suit, with graying brown hair and a matching beard, nodded to the soldier. "Thank you," he said.

With a nod, the soldier pulled himself toward the cockpit.

The well-dressed man turned toward the younger lady sitting beside him. "Enjoying the view, Mutsumi?" he asked with a smile.

The brunette woman, Mutsumi Otohime, turned toward the man and nodded, smiling. "It's very lovely, Father," she replied. "I've missed home terribly. Do you think Tama-chan has been okay without me?"

The elder Otohime smiled and patted his daughter's arm. "I'm certain Tama-chan is just fine, and waiting for you to get home," he replied. "You're not upset that I had to spend so much time out here working?"

Mutsumi shook her head. "No, I understand that your job is very important. You are one of the only voices of reason left between Earth and the colonies, after all." She turned to look back out her window, and a flash of light outside caught her attention. "Oh, my! Is that a shooting star?"

Her father leaned his head down to get a look at the object out the window, and his brow furrowed. _That's an atmospheric entry capsule,_ he thought to himself. _Then it must be…Operation Meteor?_

---

Higher in the Earth's orbit, in one of the Alliance's satellite tracking stations, a sensor crew watched the orbits of the near-Earth objects that had recently appeared with great interest. Five of them had emerged, apparently from behind the five different colony clusters, and were on a direct course for Earth.

"Moving object confirmed at LaGrange Point AX," one of the technicians stated, staring down into his sensors.

"So it's not just one?" the officer of the day asked, leaning over the man's shoulder.

"No sir, there appear to be five metal objects."

"Metal, huh?" There was silence for a few moments as the officer pondered that information, then shrugged. "Probably just debris or parts from an old mining satellite. Uranami is in the atmosphere, so let him know what we found."

"Yes, sir."

---

A blue-painted, delta-winged Specials Mobile Suit carrier orbited between the tracking station and the Otohimes' shuttle, waiting for the shuttle to descend so it could begin its own descent into planetary atmosphere.

Within the cockpit cabin, two black-uniformed Specials pilots sat boredly at their stations, cursing the timing of the Otohime shuttle's return to Earth. The pilot sat with his arms crossed, tapping his fingers idly against his upper arms, while the copilot/communications officer ran diagnostics checks. In the central seat behind them, a man in a red uniform top, white pants, and knee-high black boots quietly sat reading from a pamphlet. His most noticeable outfit piece was the white helmet he wore that covered the upper half of his head, complete with white-tinted lenses that made it difficult for someone to see his eyes without being right in his face.

The pamphlet in his hand, at first glance, appeared to be a set of routine orders. But upon closer inspection, it would be revealed that it was actually a calculus study guide. His right thumb concealed the property logo of Tokyo University.

A beep from the communications panel drew the copilot's attention, who accepted and screened the message. "Lieutenant Uranami, Surveillance is reporting five meteorites."

The helmeted man, Uranami, lowered the study guide and looked up. "Idiots," he said slowly. "Surveillance couldn't do their job with help from a spotter satellite. Do they really think a meteorite would ride the wave course to enter Earth's atmosphere?"

The copilot looked back at his superior. "So it's just what Headquarters said?"

Uranami nodded. "It's Operation Meteor, for certain." He took a moment to close the study guide and return it to one of the pockets in his uniform. "How many can we catch up with?"

Reaching toward the center console, the copilot called up a display to track the projected path of the five objects, all of them seeming to head for different sectors of the Earth. Sensible, considering that their points of origin were doubtless the geosynchronous-orbiting colonies. A few control manipulations plotted their own course compared to those of the objects', determining that one would pass right by them.

"Just one," the copilot answered. "The one heading for the Kanagawa Prefecture in Japan."

"That will be just fine," Uranami said. "One is all we need. A front-line soldier mustn't rush needlessly to battle."

"That's quite the bold statement, sir," the copilot said.

"As I said, I am a true soldier."

---

As the orbital insertion pod neared the terminator line between night and day, the sun peeked out from behind the curve of the Earth, brilliantly illuminating the pod as its autopilot carried it toward Japan. The automatic systems begin to disengage, sounding a gentle tone to get the pilot's attention.

But it's the viewscreens reproducing the forward camera views of the rising sun that awaken Narusegawa, her eyes opening slowly as she raises her head and focuses on her surroundings. Through the viewscreens, she can see the planet Earth dominating her forward view.

_Wow, here already?_

Lifting up her hands, she settled her right around the weapon control and her left onto the throttle. A quick check of her status revealed everything in the green, with just a minute or so until she has to take over control from the automatic pilot.

"All systems functioning," she said, for the sake of the battle recorder. "I'll commence operations in seven minutes."

A proximity alert sounded from the right side of the cockpit, flashing red warning lights up from the panel. The systems changed the image displayed on the right viewscreen to that of the Otohimes' shuttle, descending below her in the atmosphere.

"A civilian shuttle?"

She had no choice. The shuttle was an obstacle in her path, and any move to go around it meant risking damage to her craft, which was not something she wanted to do this early in the operation. Releasing the weapon control, she lowered her right hand to tap a switch grafted onto the console, opening up a hatch in the nose of her own atmospheric entry shuttle to reveal the barrel of a beam cannon.

"Relative speed to target, Zero-One-Five-Four-Five," she said. It was a civilian ship, she knew, and she did not want to cause civilian casualties, but some things had to happen in war. Still, she would have much preferred her first confirmed kill to be Alliance or OZ, not civilian.

Shaking her head, she tightened her grip on the weapon control. "Auto-lock engaged. Preparing to destroy the obstacle."

Another proximity alarm sounded, this one louder and accompanied by a larger array of lights. She glanced down, and bit back a curse. The louder alert was the result of hostile sensor painting.

"Alliance assault carrier?"

---

"We've caught up," the pilot of Lieutenant Uranami's carrier announced. "Bringing the target up onscreen."

Uranami looked down to the center console that now displayed a hazy, shaking image of Narusegawa's entry shuttle. The poor quality was a result of the holocamera viewing it at maximum range. The Specials commander smiled humorlessly. "So, that's their little flower, all ready to blossom into new battles," he said.

"He'll have to reduce speed," the copilot said. "There's a civilian shuttle ahead."

"What're the odds he'll shoot the shuttle down and keep going?" the pilot asked.

"He won't do that, now that we're watching him," Uranami calmly answered. "Remember, he's on a secret mission, and destroying a civilian craft won't exactly help him in that regard."

---

Narusegawa hammered her fist against the grafted switch, closing the cannon access hatch, and swore. "The Alliance is already onto me!"

The ambient temperature in the cockpit skyrocketed as the pod entered the Earth's atmosphere, a veil of flame surrounding the craft as the white hull of the shuttle glowed an angry red.

"Finally," Narusegawa breathed, turning down the environmental controls of her suit. "I've made it back to Earth…"

Now with the option of shooting down the shuttle thankfully removed, she knew she would have to risk some damage to her unit to slip past the civilian craft. With her left hand, she released the throttle control and tapped a few buttons.

Outside, maneuvering thrusters on the nose of the craft fired, changing the craft's angle of entry, and then the sextet of vernier engines mounted to the rear of the craft roared to white-hot life, propelling her ship down into the atmosphere at a steep angle.

Tightening her grip on the control units, Narusegawa stared ahead at her destination, the shimmering blue ocean just east of Japan, and sweated out her reentry.

---

"He must think the only way to keep this a secret is to destroy his craft," Uranami's copilot said. "But his speed is increasing; it looks like he's trying to break away."

"That's impossible," the pilot retorted. "There's no way he could survive that heat."

"Don't be so quick to assume, gentlemen," Uranami said, leaning back in his seat, lacing his fingers together over his right knee, and watching the streak of flame burning through the sky before them. "Our enemies are clearly very technologically-advanced."

---

By now, the heat of reentry was beginning to melt the leading edges of the atmospheric entry pod. Inside the cockpit, Narusegawa looked over the warning indicators, smirking morbidly. "Looks like it's time to get rid of this turtle shell," she said, tapping a series of buttons also grafted onto the cockpit.

A series of muffled bangs rocked the craft as the carefully-placed demolitions charges detonated, blowing away the outer shell of the entry capsule, leaving behind a sleek fighter-like craft of varied coloration. Its main feature was the long-barreled beam cannon that served as the fighter's "nose", and the thin, yellow-and-white wings it deployed to its sides.

Grinning, Narusegawa pushed the throttle all the way forward, sending the fighter rocketing forward the rest of the way into the atmosphere. "Let's see those Alliance losers catch me now," she said.

---

Uranami leaned forward in his seat, closely studying the multispectral scan of the fighter being displayed on the main monitor, broken down into a simple blueprint-design of the craft. Its primary features included radar-absorbant construction material, a powerful engine system, and variable-geometry wings.

"So, the enemy's new weapon is a fighter," Uranami said.

"It moves just like a bird…" the copilot commented.

"We've reached cruising altitude," the pilot announced, flipping the switch to lower the heat shields covering the cockpit viewports. "We can proceed with the attack."

Far ahead of them, the fighter was a mere speck of light.

"Let's give him a wake-up call with the machine guns," the copilot said, reaching for his weapon controls.

"No," Uranami interrupted. "No machine gun. Shoot him down!"

"Lieutenant?"

"We were told that the objective was to bring in the weapon," Uranami said. "But it's not the weapon, it's the _pilot_ inside that matters."

---

Narusegawa's control panel screeched a warning of a hostile weapons lock just as the first volley of heavy cannon fire streaked over the topside of her fighter. She instinctively threw her craft into a barrel roll, losing hundreds of meters of altitude as incoming fire shot harmlessly past her.

Pulling out of the roll, she glanced contemptuously back in the direction of the enemy craft. "I'll escape without a doubt," she said, smirking. A beeping sound drew her attention to the mission monitor, which was scrolling new information. "Alter mission?" She paused, reading the data. "That ship's carrying Mobile Suits. By speed estimates, it's probably got three Suits on board. Not a bad score for my first mission."

With a controlled thruster burst and a twist of her control stick, she had reversed direction in the course of less than a hundred meters and was now roaring back toward the Alliance carrier. "No problem, I'll take out that carrier before heading down to my insertion point."

---

Uranami was on his feet and heading toward the cockpit exit as soon as he noticed the change in the craft's course. Behind him, the pilot and copilot were both staring at their instruments. "Enemy fighter has turned around and is heading straight for us," the pilot reported.

"Is Leo ready for use?" Uranami asked simply.

"You're going out in a Mobile Suit?" the copilot asked.

"Of course."

"Wouldn't the Aries light, speed models be more effective than the ground-based Leo?"

Uranami smiled coldly. "My Leo is plenty fast enough." As he passed into the Mobile Suit bay, he called back over his shoulder, "Besides, if it's a fight he wants, I should at least give him my best."

Barely a minute later, the rear loading hatch of the carrier opened, deploying the ubiquitous green Leo on magnetic tracks. This unit, Uranami's personal Leo with a heavy-artillery dober gun, fired its thrusters to orient itself in midair.

"_Lieutenant Uranami, I'll send backup as soon as the Aries are ready."_

"Roger," Uranami answered, his voice drowned by a proximity alert tone from over his head. The helmeted warrior looked up to see a glint of light rushing down at him. "From above?"

His Leo spun in place, belying the natural awkwardness of the lower-mobility Mobile Suit, and oriented the dober gun, firing a condensed shell of high-explosive energy up toward the enemy fighter. The shot passed the fighter, but its proximity sensors caused it to detonate in the wake of the craft.

Ignoring the near miss, the multicolored fighter came directly at Uranami's Leo as if intending to ram him, but a deft application of thrust pulled the ace pilot clear of the collision. He spun, carefully lining up the dober gun, and fired again.

This time, the shell detonated against the rear drive system of the fighter, blackening the red drive ports and causing the three right engines to flare out. Trailing smoke, the fighter spiraled down into the atmosphere.

"_Nice shot, Lieutenant Uranami!"_

The ace pilot scowled. "So much for that guy," he said. "That was far too easy."

"_Lieutenant, shall we go after him with the Aries once you return with the Leo?"_ another pilot asked.

Uranami looked to the viewscreens on either side of him to see a pair of streamlined, black high-mobility Aries units hovering beside him. One wielded a missile pod, while the other carried a simple assault rifle and parachute pack.

"We'll follow in the carrier and capture him on the ground," Uranami replied. "It's our chance to find out more about Operation Meteor."

"_Any chance he'll blow himself up?"_ the pilot of the carrier asked.

"Unlikely," Uranami answered, focusing his attention on the distant form of the falling fighter. "After all, he's made it this far to Earth. If I were in his position, I wouldn't commit suicide without setting foot on it."

---

Suicide was the farthest thing from Narusegawa's mind. She had hastily determined that the right drive system of her fighter was shot, and that she'd have to take drastic measures to avoid a fatal crash.

"I really didn't want to reveal myself this early in the game, but…"

Reaching up her right hand, she grabbed a lever mounted in the ceiling and pushed it forward, while simultaneously depressing the left rudder pedal. And then the phrase 'variable geometry' took on an entirely new meaning.

The forward section of the fighter pitched down as the wings folded upward to come to rest ninety-degrees closer to each other than their previous configuration. The engine section twisted one hundred and eighty degrees, the engines themselves straightening out and shifting their formation.

What had minutes ago been an oversized fighter craft was now a massive, white-red-and-blue Mobile Suit, complete with a red tower shield attached to its left arm, and the beam cannon held standalone in its right hand.

---

"It transformed into a Mobile Suit!" Uranami cried, shocked beyond comprehension. With a few input commands, the sensors focused in on the retreating form of the newly-revealed Mobile Suit, studying it intricately.

"_What kind of machine is that?"_ one of the Aries pilots asked.

"I have no idea," Uranami answered, truthfully. He grimaced. _I thought only the Alliance and OZ had the technology to create Mobile Suits…_

"_Lieutenant, leave him to us,"_ the other Aries pilot said, attaching the parachute pack to the back of Uranami's Leo.

"Do it," the ace pilot answered simply.

With that, the two Aries engaged their thrusters and roared down in pursuit of the free-falling Mobile Suit, firing furiously down at it. Bullets from the rifle Aries' gun pinged off the armor of the blue-and-white Suit, but a quartet of missiles from the other Aries had a decidedly more satisfactory effect.

The four missiles slammed into the back of the craft, directly between its wings, blowing off chunks of armor and causing smoke to issue from the Suit. But its only response to the assault was to roll out of control through two rotations before the pilot regained control and once more turned its back on the incoming enemies.

"He's intense," Uranami muttered to himself.

Its missile pod empty, the second Leo switched to the rifle hanging from a wing hardpoint and joined its comrade in raining a hailstorm of fire down on the enemy Mobile Suit. After several moments, the enemy finally reacted, turning its humanoid head to 'stare' back at the Specials craft.

"_It moved,"_ one of the pilots noted.

"_Forget it, just shoot!"_

The enemy Mobile Suit turned to face the two Aries, leveling its massive beam cannon at them. The weapon's emitter glowed with golden energy for a moment before a tremendous beam of golden energy roared out of the weapon, spreading wider as it shot out to engulf the two Mobile Suits. The lightly-armored Aries units' armor immediately began to warp and melt away under the assault, until finally the two Suits detonated, filling the sky with a tremendous pair of explosion clouds.

---

A cruel grin spread itself across Narusegawa's otherwise-beautiful features as her shoulders began to tremble. She began to chuckle, low and quiet at first, until a few moments passed and she had thrown her head back, laughing loudly and harshly at the fate of the two pilots.

Suddenly, she regained control of herself, narrowing her eyes to menacing slits as she glared at the only remaining Mobile Suit on the radar. "One more to go…"

---

"He blew away two Aries with one shot?" Uranami uttered, aghast. Then, despite himself, a grin crept across his face and an appreciative note wormed its way into his voice. "Not too shabby."

Simultaneously detaching the parachute pack and the dober gun, Uranami sent his Mobile Suit into a freefall toward the immensely-powerful enemy craft, his unit's right hand reaching behind the round shield attached to its left arm.

---

Twisting the weapon control stick in her right hand, Narusegawa centered the targeting reticle of her beam cannon on the falling Leo, waiting for the green crosshairs to flash red and signify a targeting lock. Just as she tightened her finger on the trigger, the Mobile Suit shot to the side, easily avoiding the energy burst fired from her cannon.

As the Leo reoriented on her, its right hand shot away from the left arm, drawing and igniting a red beam saber. At this close range, she knew her beam cannon would be ineffective. The Alliance Mobile Suit reared back as it reached her, then swung the beam sword down for her Suit's head.

Reacting instinctively, she sent her own Suit's left hand striking out, catching the Leo's wrist and preventing its beam sword from coming down any further. She didn't realize her mistake until the enemy unit jammed its left arm up under her right, preventing her from moving that arm and denying her the use of the beam cannon.

Swearing, she jerked her control sticks to try and shake off the Leo, but it was no use; the thing was grappled tightly to her. She watched helplessly as the Leo's cockpit opened up, revealing a red-and-white clad Specials soldier stepping out onto the hatch, wearing a parachute. The enemy pilot tossed a salute in her direction, before leaping clear of the tangled Mobile Suits and deploying his parachute.

And then it felt like she had slammed back-first into a solid brick wall. She slung forward in her seat, her restraints fighting to hold her back, and her head smashed into the control console.

The last thing she saw before falling unconscious was the ocean water rising up in the images projected onto her viewscreens.

---

Uranami watched passionlessly as his Leo and the unidentified enemy Mobile Suit sank into the ocean, out of sight. It was a shame; he would've loved to have gotten his hands on that fine machine to study.

"_Lieutenant Uranami, are you alright?"_

Reaching down, he retrieved his emergency comlink and held down the transmit button. "Yeah. Sorry to worry you. I did everything I could."

His subordinate wisely chose not to answer that remark. _"We've completed a full analysis."_

"And?"

"_Judging by the strength and resilience of the enemy Mobile Suit, it could only be made of Gundanium alloy."_

Beneath his helmet, Uranami's eyes widened. "So then… it _was_ a Gundam," he said. He looked down at the ocean below; it showed no signs of the precious cargo it had absorbed. "The Mobile Suit might be undamaged, but that reckless pilot won't have survived."

A flash of blue from the corner of his eye drew his attention to his carrier, which was swooping in to pick him up. _"The Marina carrier group has offered to recover the unregistered Mobile Suit."_

"Let them do as they wish. Tell them it sank east of the Kanagawa Prefecture in Japan." As he returned the comlink to a uniform pocket, Uranami laughed aloud. "They _offered_ to bring it up? There's no bright future for soldiers scurrying for their reward."

---

In the arrival terminal of the Hinata Regional Spaceport, Mutsumi closed her eyes and calmly focused on blocking out the voices of the throng of reporters surrounding herself and her father. It was always like this, wherever they went, and it sometimes took everything she had to refrain from lashing out at them. As the escalator carrying them down to the lower level hummed beneath their feet, she only hoped that there wasn't a larger crowd waiting below.

"Mister Otohime, what was discussed at the Colony Summit?"

"What are the colonies' demands to the Alliance?"

"Any comments, Vice Foreign Minister Otohime?"

Camera flashes went off around them like shots from a firing squad, but Mutsumi's father simply stared directly ahead of him, not responding to any of the questions.

"Here on Earth, people are concerned about when the colonies will attack."

Mutsumi scoffed internally. _The colonies would never attack the Earth,_ she thought. _They only want peace and to be left alone by the Alliance. If these people would only understand that, then this situation wouldn't be happening._

"It's a hostile situation with the colonies, isn't it?"

"Minister Otohime, people are very concerned. What kind of outcome can you predict? Do you think there's going to be a war?"

"Please, Vice Foreign Minister, the press would like a statement."

The entourage reached the bottom of the escalator, and Mutsumi and her father stepped off into the lower concourse. At first, she assumed that the press would continue to hound them like dogs after a steak, but when she noticed that they were hanging back, she looked up to see why.

In front of them, a middle-aged man in an Alliance officer's uniform stood flanked by two security soldiers, all of them visibly armed. The officer gestured to his left. "Vice Foreign Minister Otohime, we have arranged military transport for you. Please proceed this way."

"Now?" the elder Otohime asked. "I can't do that. I have some things to take care of for my daughter's birthday."

The officer nodded agreeably. "I've arranged a separate vehicle for your daughter."

"Don't worry about me," Mutsumi said to her father, smiling warmly. "I can find my own way."

"Are you sure?" he asked.

The brunette nodded. "Yes, I'll be fine. I know my way around Hinata just fine."

A bit reluctantly, her father nodded and turned to the officer. "Very well, then," he said. "Let's go."

The officer nodded in return, then led her father outside. The two soldiers prevented the press from following. Outside, Mutsumi's father and the officer stepped into the vehicle, which quickly departed.

Turning away, Mutsumi walked in the other direction, clasping her hands back together as she wandered through the streets of the hot springs resort town of Hinata. As she often did when walking alone, she allowed her mind to drift aimlessly, thinking of anything and nothing at the same time.

"Oh my, that's right," she said suddenly. "My birthday _is_ coming up." Her right hand came up and touched her forehead in that way she did when she'd forgotten something or was apologizing for a temporary lapse in judgment. "Silly me for forgetting…"

A shadow fell over her, causing her to look up and blink. "Tama-chan?" But what she saw was a massive military Mobile Suit airlift plane, heading toward the west, into the setting sun. "Oh, just a military plane. I guess I should probably go home. It's getting late."

As she started to walk forward, something caught her attention out of the corner of her eye and she looked down toward the shore. What she saw caused her to gasp. There, washed up on the beach, still occasionally being lapped by the incoming waves, was a figure clad in a full flight suit and helmet.

"Oh, my!" she exclaimed, then rushed down the hill to the beach. Upon reaching the downed figure, she rolled the person onto their back and spent three minutes figuring out how to release the neck seals on the helmet.

Having accomplished that, she pulled the helmet off, revealing the face of a lovely young woman with light brown hair pulled up into a loose bun, and two runaway strands of hair poking up from her head like antennae.

Mutsumi smiled and poked at one of them impulsively. "Oh, my, she has bad hair like me," the darker-haired woman said, reaching up to flick her own disobedient hair strands. "But I wonder why this cute lady is in a military flying suit?"

As she reached out to poke at her hair strands again, the woman's eyes shot open and looked around wildly, like a caged animal expecting a whip to connect with its backside at any moment. The woman's eyes settled on Mutsumi, and in an instant she leapt to her feet, using her left hand to cover her face.

"Oh my, you should be careful," Mutsumi said, smiling warmly.

"Did you see?" the woman hissed.

"See what?" Mutsumi asked, tilting her head to the side.

Snarling, the woman reached over with her right hand, flipping open an access panel to a box mounted on her flightsuit's torso. Mutsumi caught sight of a red button surrounded by a yellow and black warning label, just before the woman jammed her thumb against the button. Lowering her left hand from her face, she slammed her fist into a panel on her right forearm.

The panel on her chest exploded, pitching the woman back several feet to land on her back in the sand. Mutsumi wasn't aware of it, but the other woman had attempted to activate a suicide device.

Unfortunately for her, the device had sent its explosive energy outward, not in, and did no actual harm to her. She sat up, looking down at the charred patch of her suit where the device had been, and snarled angrily.

Standing up, she rushed past Mutsumi, knocking the other woman down in the process, and ran up the hill to the road running by the beach. She stopped in the path of a passing ambulance, which slammed on brakes to avoid hitting the woman. She ran to the right side of the vehicle and reared back her fist, slamming it with all her might into the window. The driver, having assumed that a young lady lacked the power to punch through a Plexiglas window, was unpleasantly surprised when the window shattered on impact, spraying him and his partner with glass shards.

The woman wrenched open the door, then grabbed the driver by the collar and pulled him out. Jumping inside, she had only to glare at the other emergency medical technician for him to leap out as well, then she slammed the door shut and threw the vehicle into gear, tearing off down the street.

Down on the beach below, Mutsumi sat up dazedly, holding a hand up to her head. "Oh my, where am I…?"

---

In a distant part of the world, a tall man in a blue uniform top, white pants, and knee-high black boots lowered the small binoculars he had been using to watch the opera before him from his seat high above the stage. "You say you lost three Mobile Suits in combat against a single enemy?" he asked. "That's not like you to be so careless, part-timer."

From the videoscreen on the table beside the man, Lieutenant Uranami stood in the cockpit cabin of his assault carrier, leaning on the pilot's chair as he made his report. _"We were up against a Mobile Suit made out of Gundanium alloy,"_ the helmeted man said calmly.

The other man focused his attention directly on him. "You're joking."

Uranami shook his head. _"Imagine the fallout that would happen if it turns out to have been made by the colonies."_

"Something like this wouldn't have happened if we'd been in OZ fifteen years ago, part-timer," the man said, stroking his chin thoughtfully.

Uranami chuckled. _"Fifteen years ago, I was still making kid promises in sandboxes. I don't think it would have made a difference."_

The other man laughed. "Oh yeah, I forgot that you're not as old as you look when you put that mask on. Say, don't you have some studying to do? The next mock exam is coming up in a few weeks."

"_My kid dreams and promises take a backseat when I'm needed to fight, **Colonel** Noriyasu. You know that."_

"Of course, of course, part-timer," Noriyasu replied. Then he sobered, and his face lost its amused expression. "So, it seems that the Alliance's surveillance was far from anything sufficient."

"_Gundams are on Earth,"_ Uranami said with a nod. _"The Alliance's Marina is on the way to recover the sunken Gundam."_

Noriyasu nodded and leaned back in his seat. "Okay, just leave it to my men. I'll send in some undersea recovery specialists and you can take over from there."

"_Understood."_

"I suppose this means I'll have to let Sarah stay at the Hinata apartments a little longer than anticipated," Noriyasu said. "There's nothing much we can do about it, so let's just try and get this thing taken care of as quickly as possible so we can get things back to normal."

"_I'm waiting for that day to come,"_ Uranami said, then ended the transmission.

---

In western North America, work continued as usual in an Alliance Mobile Suit production factory. This factory was dedicated primarily to the construction of Leo-class Mobile Suits, and as such only used the older-model machines for patrol and defense.

Suddenly, an explosion broiled up in the middle of the factory floor, destroying dozens of incomplete Suits and killing hundreds of workers. Red emergency lights came on as a thick wave of black smoke filled the building.

Two security Leos marched into the power generator area, scanning the surrounding shadows for any hint of danger. _"Are we under attack?"_ the lead unit ignorantly called out.

His answer came in the form of something slashing completely through his Mobile Suit, severing both arms and bisecting it in the cockpit region. Its power core compromised, the Mobile Suit detonated, consuming the pilot in a plasma firestorm. The other Leo turned, looking for the source of the attack, when it too found itself cleaved asunder from right shoulder to waist. Its severed edges sparking electricity, it likewise exploded.

The highlight of the explosion revealed a third Mobile Suit standing amidst the ruins of the first two. It was black in color, more humanoid in appearance than the Leo units, and sported an energy scythe as the weapon that had downed the two Leos.

The Mobile Suit drew the scythe back in its right arm, then swung it forward, cleaving through the turbines generating power for the factory. Sparks flew from the machine, but it still continued to stubbornly work. The attacking Mobile Suit drew its weapon across its body, then slashed horizontally outwards, this time destroying the power core.

In the cockpit of the Mobile Suit, a woman with short, light blonde hair and fox-like eyes viewed the devastation before her with a small smile on her face. "Kitsune here!" she said with a heavy accent. "I've trashed this factory, so now all I've gotta do is cut my way out!"

---

On the other side of the world, in northern Europe, ball-shaped explosion clouds and heavy machine gun fire lanced out of an Alliance-controlled military spaceport. A number of Leo and Tragos heavy artillery units had formed up outside the hangars, firing into the distance at an approaching assailant.

"_This is the Dover Base reporting,"_ a technician in the control tower called over a wide-spectrum frequency. _"We're under sudden enemy attack."_

"_Sudden enemy attack? Who's attacking?"_

"_I don't know!"_

A Tragos heavy artillery unit fired its shoulder-mounted artillery cannons at the attacker, but they exploded behind the attacking Mobile Suit, a black-and-white unit sporting twin sickles as its main weapon. As the backwash of the artillery fire died out behind the Mobile Suit, a feminine voice called out to the defenders.

"Throw down your weapons and surrender, and I'll spare your lives!"

"_Fire, fire!"_ one of the Leo units called as they redoubled their efforts.

The attacking Mobile Suit seemed to shake its head before it roared forward on its vernier boosters, rushing the defenders' line with its sickles drawn across its chest. As it reached the defense line, its right arm shot out, the razor-edged blade of the titanium sickle cutting the Tragos artillery unit into two halves. The left arm also lashed out, slashing off the upper right section of the nearest Leo.

As heavy machine gun fire from the remaining Leos pelted off the machine's armor, leaving minor dings and scratches, it turned toward the fuel depot that the Leos were viciously defending. A pair of short-range missiles shot out of launchers attached to the collar area of the Mobile Suit, slamming into the fuel depot and destroying it completely. The resulting explosion wiped out the defense line, and left the attacking Mobile Suit standing in a sea of flames.

Inside the cockpit, a young-looking girl with short blue hair looked over the devastation she had wrought, and shook her head sadly. "Shinobu Maehara reporting," she said to her battle recorder. "Spaceport successfully destroyed." Then she lowered her voice and said to the fallen enemies, voice quivering, "I told you, you should have surrendered."

---

In the Sahara desert of Northern Africa, a troop of Leo units stood amongst the sand dunes, searching for the atmospheric entry capsule that had gone down in the area. Unknown to them, a number of Mobile Suits, looking as if their design had been based on a turtle, were hidden behind nearby dunes and in sand traps, waiting for the opportunity to attack.

"_You're sure the enemy capsule went down in this area?"_ the commander of the Leo troop asked one of his lieutenants. _"There's nothing here!"_

The visual sensor of the lead unidentified Mobile Suit flashed red, indicating that it had received the attack order. It shot to a standing position, sand streaming off of its lowered rifle, and let out a battle cry that sounded like _"Myuh!"_ but was, in all actuality, the order to attack.

It opened fire on the Leos, as did the rest of its comrades, now rising up from the sand traps and from behind the sand dunes, sending a wall of incoming fire straight at the Alliance Mobile Suits.

A Leo near the commander exploded, rocking the man's Mobile Suit. _"What is it? What's happening?"_

"_Enemy attack! Enemy atta–"_ The soldier's panicked outcry was cut off by his Leo exploding.

Explosions rose up from all sides as the commander and his lieutenant rushed out of the ambush, sliding their Mobile Suits down a tall, adjacent sand dune. _"We're surrounded,"_ the commander snarled. _"Who are they?"_

The commander had landed facing back in the direction of the enemy attackers, while the lieutenant had faced the direction they were going, and seen what was waiting for them. _"C-Captain!"_

The commander now turned to see a red-and-white Mobile Suit standing before them, a massive Gatling gun mounted to its left arm, and missile launchers attached to both shoulders and legs. _"What on Earth?"_

"Ahh, so you survived my Mecha-Tama assault force!" an accented female voice called out to them. "That's very impressive! But unfortunately for you, now that you've seen me, I can't allow you to leave here alive."

The Mobile Suit raised its left arm, the barrels of the Gatling gun already spinning, and it opened fire on the two Leo units, raining a hailstorm of deadly beam bursts down on them. Both units collapsed to their knees under the strain of the attack and detonated.

In the cockpit of the heavily-armed Mobile Suit, a tan-skinned girl with blonde hair pulled up into two ponytails grinned madly as she sent her unit marching up the dune to join her comrades in mopping up the survivors.

"This is battle Zero-Zero-One," she said aloud. "Pilot's name, Kaolla Su!"

---

In the Sea of Japan, a pair of Alliance military cruisers burned brightly in the dark night, victim to a sudden and devastating attack. But yet even now, that attack was not complete.

An explosion broiled up from the deck of the lead ship as a white and blue Mobile Suit drew back a draconic claw mounted to extendable arm sections. Aside from the dragon head on its right arm, the most remarkable feature of the machine was the huge, solid titanium katana strapped to its left hip.

As the second cruiser capsized and began to slip beneath the waves, the Mobile Suit retracted the dragon head, turned toward the remaining portion of the command tower on the bridge it was standing on, and sent the fanged weapon careening into the tower.

Overhead, a pair of reconnaissance jets passed over the scene, transmitting aerial photographs of the Mobile Suit back to their home base. And it was good that they were transmitting in flight, as the machine spotted them and withdrew its dragon head. The head folded back over the right arm, revealing a humanoid hand and arm beneath it that clasped the sheathed katana.

A feminine voice from the machine shouted, _"ZANMAKEN!"_ as the sword was drawn out of the sheath and slashed in the direction of the two craft at an inhuman speed.

At first, the pilots of the reconnaissance fighters found it funny that the Mobile Suit pilot would attempt to strike them with a sword from five hundred feet up. Then they noticed the twin waves of energy rising through the air toward them.

With no time to react, the ki energy waves of the 'Boulder-Splitting Sword' attack reached the jets and passed seemingly-harmlessly between them, causing the pilots to blink, let out a held breath, and thank the gods that the enemy Mobile Suit's pilot was not only dumb, but couldn't aim either.

Then the two pilots heard a series of sounds of shrieking metal, and looked back to find the wings and tail sections of their jets disappearing, torn away by the attack. Screaming in terror, the jets, now resembling passenger-carrying missiles, plummeted toward the ocean below.

On the deck of the cruiser, now slowly beginning to sink, the Mobile Suit drew its sword across the sheath, then sheathed the blade and stared at the point of the ocean where the jets had gone down. Inside the cockpit, a young woman in a white gi and red hakama, with long, night-black hair, stared impassively at the devastation around her.

"I am Aoyama Motoko," she said calmly. "I do not hide from my enemies. This battle was over before it began."

---

Night had fallen on Hinata as Uranami's assault carrier skimmed the surface of the coastal waters as it approached the very all-purpose port that Mutsumi had discovered Narusegawa at.

With the craft on autopilot approach, boredom had again set in within the craft. "Haven't the search troops arrived yet?" the copilot asked.

Uranami, who had been studying the printed reconnaissance photos from the two destroyed jets, gave the conversation between the two pilots only half of his attention. He was more focused on absorbing every detail of the Mobile Suit in the pictures, comparing it to the one he had fought.

The similarities between the two were easy to spot, but so were the many differences. The unit he was now looking at had no visible ranged offensive weaponry, excepting that nasty variable-length dragon crusher. It also lacked the red tower shield of the previous unit, replacing it with a smaller circular shield on its left arm. Furthermore, it carried a full-scale sword on its left hip, something that his previous adversary decidedly lacked.

"They say they won't get to this area for another two hours," the pilot said.

The copilot scoffed. "The hell's taking them so long?"

Uranami didn't raise his head, and the raising of his eyes from the photographs was imperceptible behind his mask. "Don't get so worked up about it," he chided calmly. "The Gundam won't go anywhere. And besides, the water is deep in this area, so a search would take more time."

The ace pilot stood up, switching the photos to his left hand, and took the two steps separating him from the pilots' seats, leaning on the copilot's seat with his right hand as he held out the photographs. "In the meantime, have a look at something interesting."

Taking the photos, the copilot looked at the first one, which showed an explosion cloud blossoming from the bridge of the cruiser the Mobile Suit had been standing on. In that picture, though, the Suit itself was a tiny speck of white overridden by the black and orange explosion.

"What's this?"

"An OZ reconnaissance flight took these before we lost contact with them. Look at the next one."

Obediently flipping the picture, the copilot's eyes widened at the zoomed-in photo of the Mobile Suit itself, its arm disappearing inside the dust cloud from the explosion.

"Looks an awful lot like the one we encountered, doesn't it?"

"You mean there are two of these things?" the copilot asked in disbelieve.

Uranami shook his head and smiled coldly. "No, there appear to be more," he said. "There are reports coming in that an OZ Mobile Suit factory, a spaceport, and troops searching for a capsule, much like ourselves, all came under attack and have been annihilated."

The copilot counted on his fingers. "So there are four?"

"Five," Uranami corrected, "in total, if you count the one that sank." He stepped back, turning to look in the direction they had encountered the Gundam in, as if expecting it to appear behind them. "Consider us fortunate. We made it out alive after an encounter with a Gundam."

---

The next day, all seemed as if the fiasco with the Gundam attacks had been nothing more than a dream. While the military forces of the Alliance continued to buzz about the attacks, the sleepy hot springs town of Hinata was unconcerned with what had occurred practically right on their doorstep.

A female figure in a simple yellow shirt and light red skirt crested the final step leading up to the Hinata apartments. She traveled light, nothing more than a simple travel backpack filled with essentials.

She leaned her head back to stare up at the building before her. _So, this is where I'll be staying…_ she thought to herself.

"You must be the new tenant?"

She turned around at the voice to find a slightly-older looking woman standing before her, wearing a white apron over a dark brown sweater with the sleeves rolled up, and simple jeans. A half-smoked cigarette protruded between her lips.

"Yes, I am," she said, nodding politely. "I'm Naru. Naru Narusegawa."

"Welcome to the Hinata apartments, Naru," the other woman replied. "I'm Haruka Urashima, the acting landlady until my nephew returns."

Naru blinked, wondering if her hearing was already going bad. "Excuse me, did you say 'nephew'? Isn't this an all-girls dormitory?"

Haruka winced slightly. "Well, yes it is, but the owner of the Hinata, my mother and his grandmother, left the place to him when she went off on a world hot springs tour. So he's the landlord until she gets back. He's a nice guy, very responsible, so I doubt you'll have any problems with him."

Naru nodded slowly. It wasn't like she could go anywhere else. She _needed_ a base of operations, at least until she could recover her Gundam. "Well, as long as he's responsible, it should be fine," she said.

Nodding, Haruka held a set of keys out to the younger woman. "You'll be staying in room 304," she said. "Your stuff arrived earlier and I already moved it in for you."

Naru smiled. "Thank you."

With that, she turned and entered the Hinata. The first thing she noticed was how desolately-quiet it was. She supposed it could have been the result of there being no other tenants, or the other tenants all being away. In all truth, she _preferred_ the silence of the building. It made it easier for her to concentrate, and decide on a plan of action for recovering or, if necessary, destroying her Gundam.

She made her way up the stairs and to the third floor, then down the hall to her room. Sliding open the door, she set her backpack on the ground, and stepped into her room. It was a fairly-large room, with a full-sized walk-in closet and plenty of open space.

As she inspected her room, she noticed a plywood board laying loosely on the ground. Curious, she walked over to the board and leaned down to pick it up. Beneath it was a hole in her floor, that went all the way down into the room below hers.

"That's pretty dangerous, having a hole in the middle of the floor," she said. "But I guess the landlord has his reasons for keeping it."

Replacing the wooden board, she looked around the room until she found her boxes of stuff, neatly packed into the closet. Kneeling down next to the boxes, she opened them one by one until she found what she was looking for.

She reached into the box and withdrew a yellow stuffed doll that appeared to be well-loved, but also well cared-for. Wrapping her arms around the doll, she gave it a tight squeeze and rested her chin on its head.

"Well, I finally made it back to the Earth," she said aloud. "My first mission sucked, though. I only got two out of three enemy machines, I didn't get the carrier base, and I lost my Gundam because I was overconfident. And to top that off, some girl saw my face, _and_ my suicide kit didn't work properly."

She groaned, then turned her face down and buried it into the doll's soft felt. "I must be the worst pilot alive," she muttered, her voice muffled by the doll.

_**To be continued...**_

---

_The Alliance's Marina has sent out troops to find the sunken Gundam, but OZ's Uranami was the first to find the Gundam, using the Cancer Mobile Suit.Naru must destroy the Gundam before anyone gets their hands on it. But, in the dark ocean depths, another Gundam shadow appears._

_ Next, on Shooting Stars Episode 2: **The Gundam Deathscythe.**_


	3. Episode 2: The Gundam Deathscythe

**A/N: **Now, before we start this episode, I'm going to take this opportunity to get in a little bashing of my own. Hey, "Eric"? If you don't like the concept behind Shining Stars, _don't fucking read it_. Don't read half the fucking prologue, then leave a little review talking some shit at me when you didn't even read the first goddamn episode, and _especially_ if you're going to leave an anonymous review so I can't track down YOUR sorry ass and bash YOUR shit for no reason. -Takes your fuckin' newspaper and shoves it up your ass, then lights the protruding end of it on fire- Now STAY the fuck away from my works, you ungrateful little _Hut'uun_.

For those of you who actually do enjoy this story, I apologize for that. But nobody flames me, especially with violence involved, and gets away with it. Bastard was lucky I didn't import over any of the Kuro Arashi versions of the Hina characters to deal with his ass. I don't think he'd want to have an angelic Naru beating the shit out of him with a fly-by Naru Punch, would he?

So, again, apologies for flying off the handle like that. To those of you who actually do like being here, enjoy Episode II - The Gundam Deathscythe:

* * *

_Oh yes, I _like_ it quiet,_ she thought bitterly._ The silence is good, it'll help me concentrate and come up with a plan. Silence is golden, right Narusegawa?_

Growling in frustration, Naru slammed her pencil down on the table top, inadvertently snapping it in half. She cast a hateful glare over the collection of study guides, textbooks, and old mock exams scattered across the table.

"Not only do I have to figure out what I'm going to do about my Gundam, I've got to study for the Tokyo U exams as well," she groaned, tangling her fingers in her hair and seriously considering a series of hard yanks. "Why couldn't my cover have been set up with me already a student of Tokyo U? Why does Doctor J have to make me actually study my way in?"

"Going for Tokyo University?"

By the time Naru realized that the voice hadn't come from a ghost or an OZ assassin, she had already managed to crawl halfway out of her skin. She settled herself back on the floor and looked toward her door sheepishly, hoping against hope that Haruka hadn't heard everything she'd said.

"Yeah, I am," she answered, sounding more nervous than she wanted to. "I've wanted to go there since I was little."

Haruka nodded and stepped into Naru's room, balancing the tray of tea in one hand. She set the tray on the table, then seated herself across from Naru. "That's an interesting coincidence," she said, pouring a cup of tea and passing it to the younger girl. "My nephew's been wanting to get into Tokyo U for fifteen years, ever since he was five years old."

Naru accepted the tea with a gracious nod, then sipped it slowly. "Fifteen years?" she asked. "He must be really dedicated."

"He's _very_ dedicated," the acting landlady answered. "Though, I suppose his reason for wanting to get in has changed since the Alliance took over the Tokyo region and placed a military headquarters in the university. He probably wants to get in to ruin them from the inside, now."

"I do suppose a five year old wouldn't have revenge on his mind when he decides to do something, would he?" Naru asked with a giggle.

Haruka smiled. "No, definitely not Keitaro. He's a very sweet boy, even today. Hardly ever thinks of himself."

Naru nodded slowly. This Keitaro sounded like the kind of man she could come to admire, perhaps even fall in love with. Dedicated, selfless, thoughtful of others… And then, like she'd been pistol-whipped in the face, she jerked upright and pushed those thoughts away. She was a Gundam pilot; she didn't have any time for love or relationships. Maybe, if she survived the war…

"Are you okay?" Haruka asked, tilting her head to one side.

Blinking, Naru realized that she'd reacted to her thoughts physically, and colored slightly. "Oh, oh yes, I'm fine," she lied. She needed to change the subject, and fast. "Umm, if it's not too personal, why did he originally want to go to Tokyo University? You would think a five year old would be more interested in playing with his friends."

"Well, that's what got it started, really," Haruka replied, taking the cigarette out of her mouth and crushing the burning end between her fingers. She wiped her fingers off on a napkin, rolled the cigarette up in the same napkin, and set it aside. "When he was a little boy, back when this place was a hotel, he used to stay here every summer. And there were two girls that he played with all the time. One day, he came in more excited than I'd ever seen him, and started talking about a promise he'd made with one of the girls to get accepted into Tokyo University."

The elder woman withdrew a pack of cigarettes from within her apron, seemed to debate on lighting up another, then apparently decided better and put them away. "The other girl had told him that if two people who loved each other went to the university together, then they'd live happily ever after," she explained. "So he turned right around and made that promise to the first girl. To tell you the truth, I'm surprised he didn't make the promise with the girl who told him about it, but then I realized that _that_ little girl had always tried to play matchmaker between Keitaro and the other girl, who was a few years younger than both of them."

Naru smiled warmly. "That's a very heartwarming story," she said. "It doesn't seem to be the wisest reason for going to Tokyo University, but I have to admit that I would be very flattered if a guy tried his best to get into the best university in the nation just because of a love promise he'd made to me."

Haruka smiled as well. "Yes, Keitaro is quite the romantic individual, even if he doesn't realize it most of the time, and denies it when he does. I'm sure he'll make his promise girl very happy when they meet again."

"Meet again?" Naru asked.

"Yes," Haruka replied, her voice dropping. "This is the sad part of the story. A few days after Keitaro and his girl made their promise, she moved away. The other girl did her best to keep Keitaro happy, but she also had to move not much later. The matchmaker girl moved to Okinawa, while I think the promise girl moved out to the colonies."

For a reason that Naru did not understand, her heart skipped a beat. "Th-the colonies?"

The older woman nodded. "Yes. I don't know which cluster she moved to, though. And we haven't seen or heard from her since the day she moved."

"That… that's so sad," Naru said.

For a moment, there was silence between the two, and then Haruka suddenly sat up straighter. "Hey, I just remembered that I've got an old photo album around here somewhere that has pictures of Keitaro and his two friends when they were kids." She stood up and headed toward the door. "Let me go see if I can find it."

The sudden silence that descended on the room in the wake of Haruka's exit caused Naru to shiver slightly. She stared down at the exam booklets before her. _I wish someone loved me enough to make a promise like that with me, even if they didn't really intend or manage to keep it._ She sighed miserably and settled her chin into both hands. _I guess this is why I became a Gundam pilot in the first place. At least I'll have some worth in fighting for the colonies…_

At just about that moment, Haruka returned through the doorway, cradling a large, leather-bound book in her arms. She seated herself in the same place she had been before and pushed the tea tray aside, before laying the book on the table. Carefully opening the cover of the book, she flipped through page after page of family pictures.

For her part, Naru politely remained in place, not peeking at the pictures when it was obvious that Haruka was looking for one or two pictures in particular. Finally, after turning ten or so pages, Haruka exclaimed, "Aha!" Without looking up from the pictures, she waved Naru over. "Come over here and see."

The young Gundam pilot stood up and walked to the other side of the table, kneeling down to look at the pictures. Haruka pointed to a picture on the left page, that showed a little boy holding up a clenched fist, a grin on his face and one eye closed in a wink. Two little girls were in the foreground of the image, facing him, their backs to the camera. One wore a flowered, violet kimono, and the other wore an olive-and-white striped shirt under red overalls. By their body language, the girls seemed to be laughing.

"Keitaro was always the ringleader in their little games," Haruka explained, smiling. "The three of them were always so energetic when they played together. It was never boring around here in the summer."

The rest of the pictures on the page were similar; pictures of the three of them playing tag, playing on the swings, playing in the sandbox. Haruka pointed to another picture on the right page, this one a picture of the little boy and the girl in red overalls. They were both smiling, but Naru could tell right away that the smiles were forced, that the two children were both sad.

"This picture was taken after his promise girl moved to the colonies," Haruka said. "Keitaro and the other girl were so depressed after she left." Her face screwed up as she tapped her chin, thinking. "Let's see. Keitaro always used to call this girl Mu-chan. And her parents were the Otohimes…" She frowned. "I can't remember her full name."

"What about the promise girl?" Naru asked curiously.

"Well, we had a picture of all three of them, but I think Keitaro stole it and gave it to her before she left. There was another one in here, though…" She turned to the next page. "Ah, there it is."

"Wow," Naru said.

There was only one image on the entire page, surrounded by heart stickers, hand-drawn hearts, and the various scribblings and writings of children. The picture showed the girl in the kimono kissing the little boy on the cheek, both of their faces bright red. Naru leaned over the album, closely inspecting the girl's face. _So familiar…_

"Hey, look at this," Haruka said, pointing to one of the writings in a corner of the page. She turned it so that Naru could read it.

When the meaning of the crayon-scrawled words reached Naru, she gasped loudly. "But this…"

There, in bright red crayon markings, the words "Kei, don't forget our promise. Love, Naru" stared up at her.

At that moment, all the thought processes in her mind just shut down. She swayed slightly in place as her eyes darted across the page, reading everything on it. Finally, she settled on the picture once more, focusing on the little girl in the picture, herself as a child. _That's…me…_

"I wondered why your name sounded so familiar," Haruka said, breaking the silence. "I'm amazed I didn't think of it before now." She looked up and noticed that Naru was simply staring at the picture with wide, tear-filled eyes. "Naru? Are you okay?"

"I… I… this can't be… can it… but fifteen years ago…"

Haruka reached over and wrapped an arm around the young girl's shoulders, giving her a comforting squeeze. "Hey, hey, take it easy," she said softly. "I know it's a big shock and all…"

Suddenly, Naru just smiled. She looked up at Haruka, wiping her tears away with her left hand. "Now I know why I've been trying so hard to get into Tokyo University," she said.

Haruka chuckled. "Keitaro's going to go nuts when he finds out that his promise girl is living here now, and doing everything she can to keep their promise."

The younger girl took a deep breath. "I want to see him!" she said suddenly. "Do you know where he is?"

"Sorry," Haruka answered, shaking her head. "He's away on business. We never know how long that is, but he should be back in less than a week."

Naru's expression visibly saddened, but she still seemed extremely happy. "Thank you so much, Haruka," she said. "You've given me back a purpose. I owe you more than I could ever repay."

Smiling, Haruka patted Naru on the head. "Don't worry about that," she replied. "Just make my nephew happy." She stood up, leaving the photo album on the table, and retrieved the tray of tea. "I'm going to go get dinner started. It'll be ready in about half an hour."

As soon as the sound of Haruka's footsteps disappeared, Naru laid back on her floor, pillowing her head on her arms and staring up at the ceiling, a bright smile on her face. "I know what I'm going to do now," she said to no one in particular. "I thought my only purpose in life was to fight for the colonies, my home. But the colonies aren't my home now. My home is wherever Keitaro is, and I don't need to fight for that. So I'm going to destroy my Gundam and then focus on fulfilling my promise to Keitaro."

---

In the ocean several miles out from the Hinata hot springs town, an Alliance-controlled Japanese carrier fleet drifted in the waters where the Gundam had gone down. Bulldozers were being used to push seagoing Mobile Suits from the deck of the aircraft carrier into the ocean, a painstaking process caused by the vessel's lack of ability to deploy seafaring Mobile Suits.

"What's taking so long?" the fleet commander growled irritably, watching as another blue-colored, crab-like Mobile Suit was pushed over the side of the ship.

"We're having trouble deploying the Suits because the carrier isn't equipped to launch them properly," an ensign replied.

"Don't stop until all the Mobile Suits are deployed," the commander replied.

A tone sounded from the nearby communications panel as the technician manning the station looked up. "Captain, I have Lieutenant Uranami from Specials on the line."

The commander snarled. "What does Seta's little pawn want now?"

On the videoscreen, the masked visage of Uranami appeared. _"I understand you're having problems,"_ he said simply.

"It's none of your damn business!" the commander snapped.

"_I may be out of line in saying this,"_ Uranami stated matter-of-factly, _"but don't you think the length of this search will affect your evaluation by the Alliance?"_

"Damn you!"

A smirk appeared on the masked man's face, which he quickly wiped away. _"To be honest, we're having some engine trouble with this special new Mobile Suit deployment submarine."_

"You Specials are just wasting the Alliance's money with your little toys."

"_Well, we'd like to make some repairs to our submarine…"_

The commander narrowed his eyes. "You mean in my fleet."

"_Naturally. And in return, we'll loan you our latest model Pisces and Cancer Suits."_

Another smirk appeared, this time on the face of the Marina fleet commander. "You let us use your Mobile Suits, and we keep quiet about the engine trouble," he stated simply.

"_We are agreed, then?"_

"You're on. Get those Suits over here."

---

Deep beneath the surface, in the command center of the Specials submarine, Uranami smiled humorlessly as he cut off the communications channel. _It has become so easy to manipulate these Alliance officers…_ he mused to himself. _At this rate, it'll be a simple matter to complete Seta's plans, demolish the Alliance, and then I can get back to more important things._ At that, a brief vision of two young children playing together in a sandbox and making promises of the future flashed in his mind. _At least, more important to me._

"Lieutenant Uranami, there isn't anything wrong with our engines," one of his officers said, drawing him from his internal musings.

"Yes, but this is the only way he wouldn't complain about us intruding on the search area," Uranami answered off-hand. "We only need the time to find what we're after."

The officer laughed. "And since they're using ancient nuclear-powered aircraft carriers, they're not properly equipped to launch enough Mobile Suits to find the Gundam before we do."

"You guessed it," Uranami said with a devious smile.

---

Naru glanced up at the clock on her wall. If Haruka stuck to her half hour estimation, then Naru still had ten minutes until it would be time for dinner. That was just enough time…

She turned her attention back to the laptop she had brought with her from the colonies. Hacking into the logistics manifests of Alliance military bases was simple; she'd been doing it since she was eight. Equally simple was the matter of searching through weapons stores to find the right munitions for the job.

"Let's see here," she muttered. She had developed a habit of talking to herself very early on in her training as a Gundam pilot. Even though it sometimes ran the risk of exposing her secret, she found it helped her to concentrate. "Air to air missiles, no way, not enough explosive power. Air to surface missiles have more power, but still not enough. Cruise missile? Well, that'd definitely do it, but there probably aren't any in the base near here."

Cupping her chin in her left hand, she rested that elbow against the desk and continued to type and scroll through information with her right hand. "Hmm. Surface to air missiles won't do it at all… Ah, here we go. Deep-operation anti-submarine torpedoes. This'll definitely do the job. Now just need to make sure there are some nearby…"

She returned both hands to the keyboard and began pulling up logistical manifests of the nearby Hinata Marina naval base. "Perfect! We're all set." A notification came up on the laptop screen, reminding her of various things she still needed to take care of to keep her cover. "Oh, yes. Let's see here… Ah, here it is." She produced a data disk from her pocket and slipped it into the CD drive of the laptop. "Okay, what've I got to handle? Hmm. Hinata apartment boarding fees…? Clear. Prep school entrance fees, clear. Rent for the next month? All clear. Financial background on one Narusegawa Naru, perfect."

With that, she closed out all her programs of questionable legality, and returned the disk to its safe place within her clothing. Shutting down the laptop, she leaned back from her desk and stretched. "Everything's good to go. After dinner, I'll head over to the naval base and get rid of my Gundam."

She paused for a moment, a faint sensation of regret over her decision to abandon her mission for the colonies passing through her mind. "It _is_ kind of wrong of me to just abandon this important mission," she mused aloud. "The colonies _are_ depending on me, after all. But they were never home for me. I was just _there_. This place, this is more like home. And besides, it's not like anybody needs to know I was a Gundam pilot. Maybe, one day, if OZ starts getting too uppity around here, I'll steal a Mobile Suit and give 'em a reason to piss off."

Another brief thought came to mind, one that caused her heart to flutter. "And what if Keitaro would fight alongside me?" She clasped her hands together and stared off dreamily into the afternoon sky. "True, it's not really romantic, but what better way to express our love for one another than to take up arms and watch each others' backs in a battle. And then, after the battle is over…"

She blinked hard as her daydream took a sudden, _strong_ deviation from anything remotely child-friendly. "Ack! What am I thinking? I don't even know if he's still interested in me after all this time!" She felt heat rising to her face and she laughed nervously. "I guess I need to get better control of my fantasies…"

From downstairs, she heard Haruka's voice call out, "Naru! Time for dinner!"

"Coming!" Naru called back, taking a moment to ensure she had stopped blushing before running out of her room to eat.

---

Deep beneath the waters of the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Japan, Lieutenant Uranami stood watching the monitors on the submarine. Sonar was next to useless in locating the sunken Gundam; about all it would do is reveal the outline of the Mobile Suit. Metal detectors were the best bet, but even that was iffy, considering that Gundanium was a mixture of mostly non-metallic elements.

Suddenly, for no apparent reason at all, Uranami sneezed. He blinked for a moment, then scratched his nose.

"Bless you, Lieutenant," the officer said. "You know, they say that if you sneeze for no real reason, it means someone's thinking about you."

"I've heard that too, but with as many enemies as I've made, I'm not really surprised," Uranami replied with a chuckle.

A pinging from the instruments drew their attention back to serious business. "Metal detectors have picked up a trace of something at point Five-Five-Zero-Zero," the sonar officer said.

Uranami nodded. "Deploy our Pisces and Cancer to check it out," he said.

His officer stood up from the communications station. This man had also been the copilot during their encounter with the first Gundam. "Lieutenant, let me handle this," the officer said.

"Are you sure?" the masked man asked. "It may just be wreckage from one of the past world wars, after all."

"I know, but please leave this to me."

"Very well," Uranami replied with a nod. "Move out."

Minutes later, the front end of the submarine's two bulbous compartments opened out, a blue Pisces emerging from the right side, and a red Cancer from the left. A second Pisces emerged from the right section.

"_Pisces will take the lead and Cancer will follow,"_ Uranami's officer said from within the red Mobile Suit. _"I'll be giving the orders."_

"_Roger."_

"_Roger."_

As the three Mobile Suits descended deeper into the ocean, the sonar officer watched as six new blips appeared on the screen. "Lieutenant, I'm picking up Mobile Suits from the Marina group."

Uranami walked up to the officer and looked down at the screen. "Seems as though the captain's caught on to us," he said.

Before the sonar officer could reply, a heavy vibration coursed through the submarine, followed closely by the muffled sound of an explosion. On the sonar screen, one of the dots representing the Marina Suits flashed red and then vanished.

"An explosion?"

"The Marina's Mobile Suits are being destroyed at the same depth we're at," the sonar officer reported.

Uranami spun around, turning toward the helm officers. "Stop the engines!"

"Stop the engines, aye!"

Another muted vibration ran through the ship as the engines were suddenly brought to a full stop. The omnipresent thrumming of the massive engines vanished, leaving the command center deathly quiet.

"What about Pisces and Cancer?" the sonar officer asked.

"We'll have to trust them to handle themselves," Uranami replied, placing a hand on the wall as he leaned down to stare intently at the sonar screen. His eyes narrowed behind his mask. "What in the world is going on?"

---

Dozens of meters away, a Marina Pisces drifted through the water, its right drive turbine nonfunctional, and a mass of oxygen bubbles leaking from the rear-mounted tanks. Something flashed vertically across the underwater Mobile Suit, compromising the power generator. The stricken Suit exploded, scattering debris in a twenty-meter radius around itself.

Another Pisces attempting to flee nearby met a similar assault, the momentum of its movement causing the two halves to split in completely different directions before it, too, exploded, creating a haze of churned water and escaping oxygen.

A dark shadow appeared in the midst of the haze before blasting its way clear. It was a black Mobile Suit, a long pole with an energy blade emitting from the side held in both hands. The black Suit targeted a red Cancer which was shifting into combat mode in an attempt to defend itself.

Before the Alliance mech could let off a single shot, the black Mobile Suit struck with its bladed weapon, cleaving the enemy craft in two in a single blow. The resulting explosion cloud obscured the battlefield, blinding the visual sensors of the one remaining Pisces.

"_We're under attack!"_ the pilot frantically screamed into his radio. _"But I can't see the enemy anywhere!"_

He let out a shocked cry as the black Mobile Suit literally grabbed his own, the unidentified mech tearing off the Pisces' left engine-arm before slamming its arm down with enough force to activate the Pisces' meager self-destruct device. The Mobile Suit exploded, illuminating the black Suit in the murky depths.

---

On the ocean's surface, alarm klaxons were howling on every ship in the fleet. Torpedo launchers mounted on the carrier and destroyers elevated to the proper angle. On the bridge, crew and officers were rushing frantically from one station to another.

"We've lost contact with all of our Mobile Suits!" the communications officer reported.

"Launch torpedoes to those coordinates," the fleet commander ordered without hesitation.

"But sir, Lieutenant Uranami's submarine is still in the area," his executive officer replied.

"He could be the enemy!" the commander snapped back. He spun, turning to the weapons officer. "Launch!"

Without another word, the officer input the firing data and triggered the torpedo launch systems. A barely-noticeable tremor coursed through the carrier as volley after volley of anti-shipping torpedoes were launched up into the air, only to arc down and dive into the water, heading toward preprogrammed coordinates. The destroyers flanking the carrier launched their own volleys of torpedoes, adding to the already-considerable amount of firepower diving into the ocean.

---

"Torpedoes incoming!" the sonar officer shouted.

"Where?" Uranami turned toward the man, the red emergency lighting casting hard backlights on his white helmet.

"From the Marina carrier fleet!"

"What an _idiot_," Uranami snarled. "What is that fool trying to accomplish?"

As he spoke those words, the first volley of torpedoes reached their preprogrammed depth and exploded, rocking the submarine violently. More explosions followed, and Uranami could distinctly hear glass jars breaking as they fell from shelves in the galley. He reached out and grabbed a handhold mounted to the wall to remain on his feet.

The videoscreen came online with a transmission from the Cancer pilot. _"What's with all the commotion?"_

"Be on your guard," Uranami called back, staggering forward and seizing another handhold nearer to the communications panel. "Our enemy is nearby."

"_You don't suppose that Gundam pilot survived, do you?"_

"I doubt it, but be cautious anyway."

---

The fleet commander laughed righteously as he leaned on the sonar station, watching the red flashes indicating the detonation of the torpedoes. "How do you like _that_? Try and survive that kind of torpedo shower!"

From behind him, a brilliant light flashed over the ship, causing most of the crew to shield their eyes or otherwise look away. The shockwave of an explosion impacted the carrier at the same time they heard the sound of it.

"What?" the commander barked, spinning around.

He watched, helplessly, as one of the escort destroyers, its bow separated from its stern and the entire ship aflame, began to sink beneath the waves, propelled down by the acceleration power of its still-active engines.

Scant seconds later, a cleave appeared amidships of the destroyer nearest to the carrier, cutting through the forward ammunition storage section. A violent explosion broiled up a moment later, lifting the entire front end of the ship out of the water at least by ten feet. The severed bow of the destroyer flipped completely forward, slamming down into the water on its right side. The rest of the ship hit no less violently, water pouring into the ship and dragging it underwater, the stern of the vessel rising up like the ancient _Titanic_ of centuries past.

Then, directly beside the carrier, a huge area of water swelled upward, rising past the deck of the carrier, before finally bursting and revealing the black Mobile Suit, the large vernier booster mounted to its back flaring white as it propelled itself out of the sea to land on the carrier deck.

As it stood to its full height, the Mobile Suit turned its head toward the command tower of the aircraft carrier, at eye level with the officers inside. Its 'eyes' glowing a brilliant green, the Mobile Suit drew the energy scythe back on its right side, paused for a moment of dramatic effect, then slammed the blade of the scythe horizontally through the command tower.

For a moment, the severed portion of the tower remained in place, but then it slowly began to slide down the angle of the slash before exploding. Behind the black Mobile Suit, a white transport helicopter lifted off the deck and began flying away from the spectre of death as fast as its engines could push it.

The Mobile Suit turned toward the helicopter, instantly deeming it to be out of reach of the scythe. In an almost-leisurely manner, the black Suit leveled its left arm toward the fleeing helicopter. A pair of blade-like extensions slid out from both sides of the shield mounted on its arm and locked into place, giving it the appearance of a pincer. A green spike of thermal energy emerged from within the shield.

The shield then surged forward off the Mobile Suit's arm, spiraling out through the open air as it homed in on the helicopter. It hit on the left side, the energy spike drilling into the side of the craft before piercing the fuel cells. The helicopter detonated, the momentum of the spinning shield directing the blast toward the right side of what had been the helicopter.

Somehow, the fuel storage tanks of the aircraft and Mobile Suits stored on the carrier had caught fire, spreading throughout the ship and generating flames that rose knee-high on the black Mobile Suit, standing triumphantly on the deck of the ruined carrier.

Inside the cockpit, Kitsune grinned widely as she kicked back in her seat, putting her feet up on the main console as she reached into a specially-installed storage cabinet and withdrew a bottle of sake and a matching glass. She poured herself a shot of the liquor, then knocked it back in one go.

"You'll all die," she said, swirling the bottle in her right hand. "Anyone who sees me has got a date with his maker."

---

Back at the Hinata apartments, sunset was rapidly approaching the dormitory. Naru had left almost immediately after dinner, citing a need to go into town and 'pick something up.' Haruka, unconcerned with the business of the tenants, simply nodded and asked if she could help. When Naru replied in the negative, she didn't bother the young woman again.

Shortly after Naru had left, another young girl had arrived, this one in a school uniform, minus shoes, with a dark tanned complexion, bright blonde hair pulled up into a pair of ponytails, and equally-bright green eyes. She was clearly another new tenant, if the number of boxes she was balancing on her head were any indication. They were all large, and most of them suggested computer equipment.

Haruka saw the girl approach from the front steps of her teahouse, which she was sweeping in preparation to close for the night. As she watched the girl expertly balance the half-dozen large, clearly-heavy boxes on her head with no apparent difficulty, she reached up and pulled the fully-smoked cigarette out of her mouth, tossing it into a nearby cigarette can. "Let me guess," she called out, stepping away from the teashop and approaching the girl. "You would be Kaolla Su, correct?"

The girl stopped and turned toward Haruka, nodding her head emphatically. The boxes teetered atop her head, threatening to overbalance and come crashing down, but they miraculously remained in place. "Yup, yup, that's me!" she exclaimed energetically. "I'm here for study abroad from my home colony!"

Haruka nodded as well. "Everything's been sorted out," she said. "Your boarding fee has been paid for by your family back home, as well as rent for the first three months, and they'll send rent payments every month after that. Your room is 301, on the third floor. If you need anything, just come see me, Haruka."

"All righty, Haruka!" Su exclaimed, bouncing through the front entrance of the apartments and disappearing up the stairs.

Back at the teashop, Haruka smiled faintly. "It seems that we're gathering a lively bunch of ladies here," she said to herself. "And all colonists, too. I hope Keitaro can keep up with them…"

On the third floor of the apartments, Su paused before entering the room assigned to her, and turned around to look out across the forest and mountains surrounding the building. It was in a large mountain cave nearby that she had hidden her Mobile Suit and Mecha Tama support army.

"I hope it will be safe to hide my Gundam there," she said to herself, before turning and bounding into her room.

---

At a hidden oasis secluded in the middle of Syria, Shinobu laid prone near the open flap of her tent, a pair of binoculars raised to her eyes that she was using both to watch for enemies and to gaze at the surrounding countryside. A tray with a half-empty cup of tea sat beside her.

"Earth is such a beautiful place," she said to no one in particular.

Outside, her Gundam was positioned in a partially-reclining pose, braced on its left arm, with its right leg canted up and the hand resting on the knee. It was certainly a position that lacked tactical concealment sensibility, but she didn't mind too much. A flock of flamingos had descended on the Gundam, taking up roost along the head, shoulders, and right arm, while others flapped idly overhead.

"Do they know how beautiful the Earth is?"

---

In a forest clearing in the northernmost part of Kyoto, a number of military trucks with warning labels of high-explosive Mobile Suit ammunition and fuel were gathered in a circle. Motoko stood off to the side of the circle with the ranking officer of the convoy, while other personnel stood guard nearby. The swordswoman held a briefcase out to the officer, both of them wearing no-nonsense expressions.

Wordlessly, the man opened the briefcase to reveal that it was completely filled with high-denomination yen notes. Without a visible change in expression, the man closed the briefcase and lowered it to his side.

The last truck of the convoy pulled up beside them, and the driver leaned out his window to ask the officer, "Where do you want these dropped off?"

Motoko spared the man a sideward glance, her expression edging swiftly toward contempt.

If the officer noticed her expression, he showed no indication that he cared. "Right here," he said.

"What?" the truck driver asked. "You're just going to hand over all these explosives to a girl?"

Reaching up his free hand, the officer pulled open the driver's door, then yanked the man out of the truck cab. "You guessed it," he replied. "She's paid for the trucks, too." The man nodded in Motoko's direction. "Take care."

"Thanks for the help," she answered flatly, then watched them leave. She had absolutely no moral qualms about purchasing arms and equipment from guerilla forces or rebel armies, nor did she care what they would spend her money on.

Once they were out of sight, she turned halfway around to look toward the deep lake nearby. A slight smirk appeared on her lips as she thought of how those rebels would have loved to have gotten their hands on her Gundam, standing vigilantly at the bottom of that lake.

---

Near the seabed several miles offshore from the hot springs town, the Cancer and two Pisces hovered just off the bottom of the ocean, scanning the dark seabed with mounted floodlights. The Cancer had its floodlights focused on the downed Leo, while the two Pisces units spread out and searched nearby.

"We've found the Leo," the Cancer pilot announced over the radio back to Uranami's submarine. "But there's no sign of the Gundam." He reached down and keyed his sensor scanner. "There's no other sources of metal being picked up nearby…"

"_There it is,"_ one of the Pisces pilots called.

The Cancer pilot looked up to see the two Pisces surrounding the downed Gundam, lying prone on its stomach on the sea bed. The twin floodlights on each Pisces had created a cone of light surrounding the powerful Mobile Suit, dispelling the shadows around it.

"_Good work,"_ Uranami's voice called out to the three pilots. _"You found it quicker than I anticipated."_

"It's amazing," the Cancer pilot replied, nudging his Mobile Suit closer to Naru's Gundam. "There's not a single mark on it."

"_Our enemies have come up with an impressive beast,"_ Uranami said, his vocal tone indicating he was smirking. _"But now that we have it in our hands, we can become fierce beasts ourselves. Watch the current; we'll wait at this depth."_

A tone signified that Uranami had closed the channel, leaving the undersea recovery experts to their job. Without needing to be ordered by the Cancer's pilot, both Pisces shifted out of naval mode and into operating mode, angling their arm-like manipulators toward the Gundam. A tad flustered at having to follow in their footsteps, the Cancer pilot likewise changed modes of his Mobile Suit.

"_Begin cabling process,"_ the ranking Pisces pilot ordered his comrade. _"Ready the floats to attach."_

"_On it,"_ the other pilot replied, extending a claw-tipped grappler cable from its right manipulator toward the Gundam.

But as the cables neared within three meters of the Gundam, a piercing klaxon alarm began to echo through the deep water, accompanied by flashing amber lights from various points of the Mobile Suit. The recovery pilot froze the grappler cables' forward momentum, leaving them to drift idly in the underwater current.

"_What's it doing?"_

The Cancer pilot narrowed his eyes as he stared at the flashing Gundam. "Is it arming its self-detonation device?"

Unbeknownst to the three Specials pilots, a large spherical object had been falling toward their position for a number of minutes. It fell into the middle of their group, directly over the Gundam, and then its preprogrammed depth recorders set the device off, causing it to burst and release a brilliant flash of light, blinding all three pilots.

"What the hell is this?" the Cancer pilot cried, shielding his eyes from the light with his right hand.

Into the chaos created by the light field drifted Kitsune's black Mobile Suit. Her Gundam landed silently on the ocean floor behind one of the Pisces, lifting a gentle cloud of ocean silt to swirl around her Mobile Suit's feet.

The Pisces in front of her drifted backwards, its pilot not even capable of seeing his controls. _"Where's this light coming fr–"_

The Specials Mobile Suit bumped into Kitsune's Gundam, rebounded, and received a clean slash through the narrow section connecting the cockpit to the drive engines for its troubles. As the pilot's question died in a choked-off gurgle, Kitsune moved around between it and the other Mobile Suits, its explosion silhouetting her to their slowly-recovering vision.

"_It's the enemy!"_ the surviving Pisces pilot cried, blindly firing torpedoes into the surrounding water. _"The enemy is here!"_

Only two of those torpedoes came remotely near Kitsune's Gundam, passing harmlessly a handful of meters over either shoulder. She turned toward the offending mech and began running toward it, her movement slowed by the drag of the water, as she drew her energy scythe across her body. She leapt up, powering the jump with a quick burst from the verniers, and slashed outward, her energy blade cutting a clean horizontal slash through the cockpit area.

As the Pisces exploded, the Cancer's pilot raised his hand before his eyes again, but at least this time he could see the enemy. "That's impossible!" he said to himself. "How in the hell can he use a thermal energy weapon underwater?"

With the Pisces' blast dying out, the pilot knew it was only a matter of time before the Gundam's murderous intention was turned to him, and realized that his only chance of surviving the next ten seconds was to strike first. With a wordless battle cry, he slammed the throttles full forward, sending his Mobile Suit rocketing toward the Gundam now turning in his direction.

The right pincer of the Cancer snared the Gundam by its left arm, immobilizing that arm and lifting the Gundam from the sea floor. The pilot snapped his left pincer around the Gundam's head, and began unleashing a volley of torpedoes at point-blank range into the Mobile Suit's head. After the sixth torpedo, the shockwaves of the explosions blew off one of the pincer mechanisms, but the pilot paid no heed and continued firing.

The seventh torpedo caused the Gundam to lose its grip on its scythe, sending the weapon drifting toward the seafloor even as the Cancer drew up short and allowed the Gundam to continue drifting backwards. The eighth and final torpedo caught the smoke-trailing Gundam on the chin, knocking it back and toward the seabed in what appeared to be its defeat.

"I did it…" the pilot murmured. He grinned, keyed his radio, and exclaimed, "I defeated it, Lieutenant Uranami!"

Before the pilot's commanding officer could reply, movement from the Gundam drew his attention toward it, just in time to realize that its left arm was aiming toward his Mobile Suit, and the pincer-like projections on the shield had opened up, allowing the spike of thermal energy to protrude. The vernier boosters on the rear of the shield flared white-hot, sending the last-resort weapon spiraling out to crushing into the Cancer's exposed body, the thermal spike eating into the Mobile Suit's armor.

As the Cancer exploded violently, Kitsune's Gundam righted itself in the debris cloud. In the cockpit, the fox woman tentatively placed a hand over the side of her head that had hit one of her consoles when her Gundam had been thrown back. She knew it'd be a bruise in the morning.

"OZ's new armor is tougher than I was expectin'," she muttered to herself, ignoring the fact that her encroaching headache was just as much a result of the liquor-induced buzz she was experiencing than from the enemy's attacks.

With the battle over, she finally managed to hear the klaxon alarms from Naru's Gundam, still blaring incessantly as the flashing lights had changed color to red, indicating that detonation was nigh. Twitching her control sticks, Kitsune turned her Gundam to stand over the fallen Mobile Suit. "So this is what they were lookin' for, huh?"

She tapped a few buttons on her console, and the forehead-mounted camera/sensor flashed green as it began to scan the Mobile Suit before her. Almost as soon as the data began appearing on her screen, her eyes opened wide. "Hey, this here Suit was built off the same design as mine was," she said, then reached forward and tapped a flashing area on the schematic. "Even the self-detonation external override port's located in the same place."

A deft manipulation of power generator allocation reduced the long blade of her energy scythe into a tiny little spike of thermal energy protruding from the emitter, which she then lowered into the override port. With a twist of the scythe's staff, the flashing lights vanished as the klaxon alarms died out.

"Well, that's a relief," she said. "All those alarms were makin' my head hurt. It's no use to waste a good Suit anyway. I'll just use this guy for spare parts."

Carefully manipulating the staff to lift the downed Gundam from the ocean floor, Kitsune powered up her vernier engines to begin the ascent toward the surface.

---

As she walked along the coastal highway overlooking the Marina base, Mutsumi's attention was drawn down to the base as a number of explosion clouds blossomed in the hangar and commons areas. Staring in open-mouthed shock, she immediately began to run toward the afflicted areas, completely disregarding the fact that she lacked proper military clearance.

---

At the outermost docks, near the weapons storehouse, a pair of Alliance soldiers stood on the deck of a docked submarine, watching the distant explosions and sounds of gunfire. A clinking sound on the submarine's deck drew their attention down, to find a fragmentation grenade spinning slowly to a stop between them, its arming pin missing.

Shouting various explicatives, the two soldiers tried vainly to get clear of the grenade before it exploded, but failed, the blast pitching their shrapnel-filled bodies across the deck.

On the foredeck of the submarine, Naru stepped out from behind the conning tower, sparing only a glance to the dead guards before she turned her attention to the crane on the dock, bearing the three anti-submarine torpedoes she had stolen for the purpose of destroying her Gundam. With her laptop in her hands, which she had used to hack the guidance system of the torpedoes, she began keying in all the necessary information the torpedoes would use to lock onto and eradicate her Gundam, wherever it was.

She heard movement behind her, and spun to face her potential attacker, leveling a Beretta 8040 snub-nose pistol at the person approaching her. As she recognized the wide brown eyes, long, dark brown hair, and protruding bangs of the woman who had found her on the beach, she narrowed her eyes and began tightening her finger on the trigger.

_No loose ends,_ she thought.

Before she could fire, she heard a gunshot from behind her, and instinctively spun to face it. This was all that saved her from a fatal interception with the incoming shot, but as a result, the round struck her right arm a few inches below the shoulder. The shock of the bullet hitting her deadened all the nerves in her arm, causing her to drop her pistol to the deck, as the force behind the impact spun her around to fall against the railing along the deck of the submarine.

As she looked up, her eyes fell on the person that had shot her. Wielding a metallic silver Browning 9mm Hi-Power in a professional-looking right-handed grip, her shooter was a woman who looked about her age, wearing light brown pants, a purple t-shirt, and black sunglasses to hide her eyes. A matching black hat covered her head, allowing little of her exceptionally-light, short blonde hair to poke out from beneath it.

"Well, now ain't this a sight?" the woman called. She nodded in Mutsumi's direction. "No need to worry your little head, lady. I got the bad guy all taken care of."

Taking a chance, Naru lunged for her pistol, but the report of the other woman's Browning told her that her chances of actually being able to get a hand on the weapon and do anything with it were nil. Sure enough, she saw a spark shoot up from her pistol as the bullet ricocheted from it, knocking it out of her reach.

Thankful for the fact that the woman hadn't decided to shoot _her_ instead, Naru then performed a spectacular belly flop on the submarine's deck, the unyielding steel mashing her more feminine assets painfully against her body. "Ow," she groaned, rolling over and trying to massage the feeling back into her chest with her uninjured arm.

"Don't go and overdo it now," her assailant drawled. "You _are_ wounded, after all."

Mutsumi, having finally gotten over the shock of having gunfire go off around her, ran over to Naru's side and began to bandage the other woman's gunshot wound, much to the surprise of the two combatants. To be honest, even Mutsumi didn't know why she was helping a woman who would gleefully kill her, apparently for seeing something she shouldn't have seen, when she really hadn't seen anything in the first place.

"H-hey, wait a second!" the short-haired woman uttered. "How in the hell'd _I_ end up bein' the bad guy?" Her wristwatch began beeping at her, causing her to look at the display, and scowl at what she saw. "It's surfaced already?" Turning toward the open sea, she shielded her eyes with her free hand, as if searching for something. "Dammit, I thought I ran those tide calculations right…"

In the distance, protruding from the sea's surface, were the two Gundams, propelled by the vernier engines of Kitsune's black Gundam. The aforementioned fox swore again as she realized that she had witnesses of her Gundam, and the one she had salvaged, to deal with.

As if to confirm that thought, Mutsumi stood up and looked out toward the sea. "Oh, what are those?" she asked airily.

Reacting quickly, Kitsune produced a handheld flash strobe from her pocket and ignited it, holding it up to block the woman's view of the Gundams. "Don't look, lady," she said harshly. "You've probably got plenty of reason for bein' here, but that out there's more trouble than you want to be gettin' yourself into. So just save yourself some grief and leave."

Once again taking advantage of Kitsune's distraction, Naru leapt up from where she had been kneeling, jumping over the railing toward the crane carrying the torpedoes. She hadn't finished programming them to seek the Gundam, but that was unnecessary now. All she had to do was trigger their engines.

"Haven't you had enough yet?" Kitsune growled, discarding the strobe to take her Hi-Power in a double-handed grip and fire at Naru's midair form. It quickly became obvious that her aim was terrible unless she took the time to line up on a target, as most of her shots pinged harmlessly off the torpedo heads.

"I won't let anyone use my Mobile Suit!" Naru shot back, slamming her fist on the code panel attached to the torpedoes.

The magnetic grapples of the crane detached, dropping the pallet of torpedoes toward the water. An instant later, the drive shafts of the torpedoes kicked in, propelling them into the water and on a straight-line course toward the two Mobile Suits. As she fell backwards through the air, Naru knew that the three torpedoes lacked the necessary power to trigger the self-detonation device since the blast would be distributed between the two Suits, but there would be plenty of power to at least sink them. And as far as she was concerned, inaccessible was just as good as destroyed.

She smiled faintly. "I've done it, Keitaro," she whispered. "Now that I've gotten rid of the Gundam, I can just live as myself, as your promise girl. All that's left is for us to meet…"

And then the tranquil sea water rushed up to greet her, and she was enveloped in blackness.

---

Kitsune could only stare in horror as the trio of torpedoes shot out on their destined rendezvous with her pair of Gundams. She caught Naru's laptop lying on the ground nearby out of the corner of her eye, but doubted she could do anything to alter the torpedoes' course before they passed the point of no return.

Her eyes as wide as saucers, she watched as the torpedoes intercepted the Gundams, followed immediately by a massive explosion pitching a column of seawater high into the air. Dimly, through the brilliant illumination and veil of water, she watched both Mobile Suits fall back beneath the surface.

"Damn it!" she swore, hammering her left hand against the railing as she looked out at Naru's form, floating face-down in the water beside the submarine. "She knows Gundanium's impact tolerance." A shiver ran down her spine as the next thought formed in her mind. "That means…and what she said… She must be its pilot."

Behind her, Mutsumi looked from the unconscious Naru, to the shell-shocked Kitsune, to the slowly-dying explosion out in the bay. "Ara… What's going on…?"

---

Deep beneath the ocean waters near Hinata, Uranami's submarine was beginning its ascent toward the surface. Inside the command center, the communications officer turned toward the masked Specials officer and shook his head. "I still can't raise Pisces and Cancer," the comm officer said.

"I see," Uranami murmured, staring off into the distance. "There's a curse that says once you've seen a Gundam, you won't come out of it alive." He smirked ruefully, and turned away from the command center, producing the calculus study guide from his pocket as he began to leave the room. "For our sakes, I hope that curse doesn't come true."

**_To be continued..._**

---****

_Naru is being held in a special medical treatment room of the Alliance military. Kitsune, in the meantime, plots Naru's escape. Uranami predicts that a Gundam will the Aries at the Alliance military base in the Mediterranean Sea. It is there that Uranami is introduced to a new weapon._

_Next, on Shooting Stars Episode 3: **Five Gundams Confirmed**. _****


	4. Episode 3: Five Gundams Confirmed

**A/N:** Dear readers, fellow fans, and other assorted folks; ye have asked, and now ye shall receive. Never had I truly abandoned this project, it just fell out of my favor. And after a few weeks of _Dynasty Warriors Gundam_ and a recent half-marathon of _Full Metal Panic!_ (I say half-marathon because I want to watch it in English dub and I can only find the first 15 or 16 episodes of the first season dubbed online) I've gotten back into the mood to work on this. A certain knowledge I came across concerning two VAs that both were in FMP and also in another anime series I'm known to write for have put the idea in my head to add a little something to this work. Some arbitrarily-named prize to whoever figures out what I added and why. Yes, the why is important. You don't get the prize if you only get the what. But you'll get 10 points if you only figure out the what.

* * *

In a remote aristocratic town in the middle of Belgium, Colonel Noriyasu stood on the shooting range of his personal estate, sighting down the barrel of an outdated M14 carbine rifle as the automated, bird-shaped targets downrange shifted back and forth.

"So we've been forced into a stalemate, huh part-timer?"

On the table beside him, Uranami was once again transmitting over a video communications feed. _"Considering that we don't know their objectives, our choice of responses is limited,"_ the masked officer calmly replied. _"But if we have to make the first move, I would do so at the Corsica Base in the Mediterranean Sea."_

"That's the old manufacturing plant for Leos, right?" Noriyasu asked, staring intently downrange, seemingly-ignoring the shifting targets. "The Alliance has been considering added security there for some time. Perhaps we shouldn't discourage them."

"_The Aries Middle East troops would be appropriate,"_ Uranami said. _"They're lacking in the way of combat experience, but an old friend of mine is one of the squad leaders, and I trust him to do his job well."_

"You want to go, don't you?"

"_What?"_

Noriyasu smiled. "It's written all over your face, part-timer," he said.

The hunting dog lying beneath the table suddenly lifted its head, looking downrange. A moment later, a red bird fluttered up from the bushes behind the target box, screeching irritably as it began to take flight. Noriyasu shifted his aim just so, and the rifle kicked in his arms as the report of a single shot echoed off the surrounding hills.

Lowering the rifle, Noriyasu watched disinterestedly as the hunting dog went off to retrieve the downed bird. "Shoot 'em down for me, part-timer."

---

Standing in the Mobile Suit bay of the Specials submarine, Lieutenant Uranami looked up at the sole remaining Suit on board, a Cancer-class maritime Suit. As he stared up at the craft, he smirked at his superior's insight; Uranami had long since called for his carrier to rendezvous with the submarine for a ride to the Corsica Base even before he had contacted Colonel Noriyasu.

"So, even the latest Cancer Mobile Suit was defeated, huh?" a voice called out from behind Uranami.

The masked man turned to see his old friend, fellow pilot, and one of the few who had seen him without his mask. "It's a shame, isn't it, Shirai?"

Kimiaki Shirai nodded, stepping up beside Uranami and looking at the Cancer. "Is the wounded enemy's new model really that dangerous?"

Uranami nodded solemnly. "We've lost five good men, and that's just too many."

"So what's our next move, Lieutenant?" Shirai asked.

"Locate the five Gundams and determine their objectives," Uranami replied, turning away from the Mobile Suit. "We'll leave this to the Alliance's Marina."

"_Lieutenant Uranami, we've made contact with your carrier,"_ a voice reported over the PA system. _"You may board whenever you're ready."_

With an absent nod to the message, Uranami began the trek toward the top of the submarine, where he would disembark and board his aircraft. As he walked, he mused internally, _The enemy is no longer in the ocean. They've gone far beyond what we've predicted and succeeded in a mission we deemed impossible._

---

At an Alliance army base in the center of downtown Tokyo, a technician idly looked over the instruments monitoring the status of the young woman secured to an examination table in the secure observation room beyond the bulletproof glass of the control room.

"Respiration twenty-seven, pulse fifty-seven, body temperature thirty-four degrees Celsius," the technician reported. "The numbers are slowly rising."

Inside the room, Naru slowly opened her eyes, carefully controlling her mental activities, and stared up at the ceiling. She noticed a steady, repetitive dripping sound, but didn't turn her head to determine that the sound was blood dripping to the floor from the gunshot wound on her arm.

_Wha… I've been captured,_ she thought. She formed her left hand into a fist and flexed her arm, testing the strength of the restraints on her. They were solid. Letting go of the fist, she surreptitiously glanced around at her surroundings. Almost immediately, she recognized where she was from various technical briefings she had committed to memory during her days of training to pilot the Gundam.

_Fiftieth floor, treatment room. Medical facility Three in Tokyo. Controlled by the Alliance._

Within the control room, the technician turned his chair toward the uniformed officer standing just behind him. "Major Seno, there's a call for you from the lobby."

Shifting his attention from the woman in the observation room down to the row of instruments and monitors on the control panel, the brown-haired Japanese man in the Alliance uniform reached forward and picked up a phone receiver from the console. "Nakakami here."

"_Sir, the disc you gave us is protected with high-level encoding,"_ a voice on the other end said. _"Our access codes don't work, and none of our cryptologists have been able to get into it."_

Seno's eyebrow went up as he leaned backward, amusement shining in his green eyes. "Sounds like a pretty tough nut to crack," he said. "The girl had the disc on her, so she must be someone of importance. Try to copy the data as is, but if you can't, run the disc down to the heavy thinkers at Corry Station."

The technician looked up from his monitors toward the Alliance officer. "So you think she's part of the rebel intelligence, Major Seno?" he asked.

"Could be," Seno replied, shrugging, as he hung up the receiver and turned to a medical analysis monitor. "Hell, she's been through quite a bit of punishment in her time. More bruises, hairline bone fractures, and other injuries than I can shake a stick at. The only one readily apparent, however, is the gunshot wound in her right arm. She's starting to make me a little nervous."

"Should we try truth serum on her?" the technician asked.

"I wouldn't," the officer replied. "Dosages always vary from person to person, and with someone as young as her, if you don't get it spot on the first time, you can't stick her again or you'll cause permanent physiological harm."

---

Outside the building, in an unobtrusive phone booth stood an unobtrusive young woman with short, light blonde hair, wearing tan pants and a purple shirt, with a beige backpack and what appeared to be a walking cane.

"Yeah, okay, that'll work just fine for me, Miss Haruka," Kitsune's inimitable voice said into the phone. "Oh, and don't worry none about the two pull carts with my stuff, I know they're both broken. Right. Uh huh. Dinner's at five? Okay, that sounds great. And I'll help ya close up the tea shop later."

With that short conversation completed, Kitsune returned the phone to its receiver, picked up the cane-like object she had leaning against a corner, and stepped out of the booth. Directly ahead of her, looming into the afternoon sun, was the Alliance hospital building.

"Well now, I think that I oughta pay a little visit to that young lady," she said to herself, smirking.

---

With his aircraft passing high over eastern China, Uranami leaned forward to pull the tactical map out of the printer and closely inspect the readings on it.

"It seems to know that we're tracking it," Shirai said. "It's the same unit that departed from the Kyoto region and destroyed that naval fleet in the Sea of Japan."

Looking up slightly from the map, Uranami crunched the numbers in his head, comparing the distance traveled by the craft with the amount of time it had been traveling. It was little more than simple algebra, but he found that it kept his mind sharp and fresh for the higher-level math usually associated with entrance examinations.

"It's a slow unit," he said finally. "It clearly isn't a unit meant for high-speed flight."

"So each of these different units has a different area of specialization, just as we thought?" Shirai asked.

"You guessed it," Uranami affirmed with a nod. "The one we encountered ourselves was a flight model with massive attack power. I believe the one we're looking at now specializes in close-range combat. We may see something entirely different in the one we're likely to encounter at the Corsica Base. We may even be able to destroy it right then and there." He paused, gave one last glance to the tactical map, then crumpled it in his hand and tossed it over his shoulder. "This machine won't make it to those ceremonies. It's heading directly for an offensive against the Alliance."

"Judging by its direction, the close-combat model is going to strike the Indus supply base."

Uranami shrugged uncaringly and turned away, moving back to his seat in the cockpit. "Pray they fight well. It's all we can do for them."

---

By that time, the close-combat Gundam had already reached the Indus base. With a single massive cleave of its titanium blade, the two guard Leos defending the south entrance were eradicated, leaving the base wide open to attack.

The Gundam marched into the base without hesitation, ignoring the hail of antiaircraft defensive fire raining down on it. Returning the sword to its sheath, the Gundam crouched, tensing as it gripped the hilt in its right hand.

"_Hiken, Zangaken!"_

With that one outburst, the Gundam's sword struck out at blinding speed, releasing a sweeping wave of ki that washed out across the antiaircraft turrets, destroying them all. That minor nuisance dealt with, the Gundam shifted the blade into its left hand and raised its right toward the huge fuel towers. The dragon crusher folded forward, and then the arm shot out to crash through the fuel tanks. Activating just a spark from the flamethrower nozzles on either side of the crusher, an explosion was triggered inside the fuel tank, igniting the entire stores of fuel.

As the base began to burn to the ground, the Gundam retracted its dragon crusher, and then swept a wave of flame across the faces of the Mobile Suit hangars, the intense heat melting and fusing the doors shut, trapping within any hapless pilots and Mobile Suits.

"They're defenseless," Motoko muttered irritably. "They can't be taking me seriously."

---

Within the observation room at the hospital, Naru took a deep breath to calm her nerves, then clenched her left hand into a fist and began to pull up against the restraints with all her might. She twisted her arm back and forth as she did so, knowing full well that her own flesh was likely to give way before the leather restraints, but still hoping she could force herself free.

After a moment, the sound of static reached her ears and she paused in her efforts, looking over toward one of the monitors on her right. The monitors would normally be used for interrogations from the safety of the control room, but since none of the technicians were aware of her consciousness; she had gone to great pains to carefully remove most of the biosensors that had been attached to her body; there was no reason that the currently static-filled monitor should be active.

And then the static was replaced by the face of the woman who had gotten her stuck in the hospital in the first place; that blonde-haired buffoon that had tried to steal her Gundam. The woman was holding one finger to her lips, indicating a need for discretion. Right; like Naru wanted to talk to her anyway.

The woman's mouth began to move. Even though there was no sound from the monitor, Naru still understood every word she said; she'd been able to lip-read since she was five.

"_Now I'm sure a talented girl like yourself can read my lips,"_ the woman was saying, _"so while you're just lyin' around, why don't you listen to me for a bit? I'm impressed that you've managed to get yourself back in the swing of things without the fellas in here knowin' anything about it."_

_Clearly, you didn't notice the unattached wires dangling somewhere below me,_ Naru thought dryly.

"_Well anyways, if you're up for a little trip, I thought I'd help you get out of here. Sound good?"_

_For now,_ the restrained pilot thought, still working at her left arm restraints. She'd rubbed her flesh raw a while ago; she could feel blood leaking down her arm.

"_I'll take that as a yes,"_ the other pilot said. _"Now if you'll just keep lookin' this way, I'll have another door open for ya in about…"_ She made a show of glancing at her wristwatch. _"…five seconds."_

Two seconds before that deadline, an explosion rocked the building, the heat and audio intensity letting Naru know that the blast had penetrated the observation room she was contained in. She looked over toward the source of the blast to find a large hole blown into the wall, with the other woman standing in it, grinning. "Time to liven things up!" she exclaimed triumphantly.

Setting her backpack down on the ground, she crossed the room to Naru's observation table and carefully inspected the restraints holding her down. "Damn, how am I supposed to get these things off? Isn't there some kinda switch somewhere or somethin'?"

And then, to the woman's great surprise, Naru's bloodied left hand appeared in her field of vision. "If you've got a knife, give it to me," she said calmly. "They're leather, so they'll cut easily."

The other woman looked up, saw the blood all but coating her arm, and recoiled in shock. "Jesus, what'd you do to your hand!?" She then looked up and saw that Naru had managed to wrench her arm free of the left side restraints, all on her own. Unnerved, she produced a pocket knife and handed it to Naru. "Well, you've certainly got some guts to ya."

Naru shot the woman a look, then went about the process of cutting herself free of the restraints. As soon as she stepped off the table, the woman was holding the backpack out to her. "It's a parachute," she explained. "We're gonna have to jump out the window to get outta here."

For a moment, Naru stared at the woman, attempting to judge her seriousness, then simply shrugged and donned the backpack. "Lead on then, fearless leader."

Nodding, the woman turned and threw a grenade toward the far end of the room, which looked out over Sagami Bay. As the two women took cover behind observational monitors, the grenade exploded, blasting out the far windows and filling the room with smoke.

"Come on!" the woman called, making a mad dash for the window. Still slightly hesitant about the intelligence behind jumping out a window to escape from a hospital, Naru cinched the straps on the parachute and followed.

Kicking off the blasted edge of the building's flooring, the woman spread her arms and legs out to the sides, taking a moment to relish in the invigorating feeling of completely unencumbered flight, unassisted by wings or engines or Mobile Suits. She watched as the woman, below her, flipped herself so that her feet were aimed down, raising the cane-like object in her left arm. A thermal energy spike activated from the end of the cane, which began to spin rapidly above her head, providing just enough lift to slow her descent toward the ground. Mimicking the woman's head over heels maneuver, Naru tugged the release handle of her parachute.

Nothing happened.

"Oh, you've got to be shi-"

"Hey, are you tryin' to kill yourself!?" she heard the sandy-haired woman call from above her as she plummeted toward the bay. "Hurry up and release your chute!"

"You gave me a broken parachute!" she screamed back up, pulling the handle again, still to no effect.

"Ah, damn, I grabbed the one I'd been meaning to fix..."

"Son of a _bitch_," Naru spat, reaching back with the other woman's knife and slicing open the flap of the parachute. The nylon flap of fabric finally deployed, the ground approaching rapidly, too rapidly, as the chute began to fully extend.

"Dammit, it's way too late to be any good now," the woman murmured to herself as she watched.

Knowing that the parachute couldn't possibly slow her descent in time, Naru guided herself toward the nearby cliffs, releasing the parachute just before hitting the rock face at an angle, sliding down its side to bleed off momentum. She knew she wouldn't come out of this unscathed; idly, she wondered how many bones she'd break and to what severity.

Momentum soon turned against her as she overbalanced and began to fall forward. She managed to twist so that she rolled sideways down the cliff, as opposed to headfirst, and braced herself for the ground looming up before her. She struck a small outcrop as she rolled, unable to bite back a cry of pain as she felt her femur snap from the impact.

The edge of the incline dropped off to vertical before the last dozen feet, leaving her to topple head-first toward the ground at a decent clip. Instinctively, she put her arm out before her to break her fall, and received a broken arm for her troubles. She flipped over, her arm serving as a fulcrum, and landed on her back on the sandy shore, thoroughly winded, pain throbbing through her body. "That sucked..."

A short distance away, the sandy-haired woman came to a halt above ground, then released her hovering device, dropping the last five feet to the ground. Walking over to Naru, she grabbed her by her good arm, a strong hand-to-wrist grip, and pulled her upright, supporting her broken leg against her own. "That was some damn fine thinking on your feet up there," she said, looking up toward the bay as a fishing trawler pulled near. "Now listen, I know you're probably still pissed about me stealin' your Mobile Suit earlier, but now we're in this together so we oughta stick together. I'm Konno, Mitsune Konno. But you can call me Kitsune."

"Narusegawa," she said, grimacing, as she cradled her broken arm against her chest. "Naru."

"Well, Naru, what's say we go pick up our Mobile Suits, eh?"

---

"_Now, in military news, mass production of Leo Mobile Suits is expected to resume at full capacity at the Corsica Mobile Suit factory without further delay. The factory had experienced major delays following an explosion, the source of which is still unknown. In order to continue inquiries into the explosion, and as a safety precaution, special troops from the Middle East garrison will oversee the factory."_

On the base's tarmac, Mobile Suit transport planes carrying the Aries pilots and mecha from the Middle Eastern garrison sat simmering in the midday heat. The rear bay of the lead transport dropped, allowing a single Aries to disembark and stand on the runway.

"Lieutenant Uranami should be there by now," the pilot said to himself, then reported into the radio, "I'll return in two hours. Masayuki Haitani, launching!"

The Aries rose on its heavy thrusters, folded its legs up and in for flight mode, and then flared its boosters to roar off into the sky, soon disappearing as a small twinkle at the end of a white streak.

Across the base, Uranami's shuttle landed on a service tarmac, coming to a halt before a line formation of eight Aries Mobile Suits, standing in perfect line with their light assault rifles held pointing toward the sky in their hands. The main door of the shuttle opened and Uranami stepped out onto the rolling staircase, looking out over the base even as he sweated underneath his uniform. "Ah, I see I'm still in time for the ceremonies."

In the center of the base, a large dirigible bearing the UESA insignia stood guarded by a dozen Leos, this dirigible being the personal transport craft of the base commander for the reactivation ceremony of the Mobile Suit production plant. Uranami considered it a foolish gesture at best, not to mention a tactical disaster.

The leader of the Leo troops, a violet-colored unit sporting dual short-barreled beam rifles and additional shoulder-mounted beam cannons, also questioned the commander's decision. _"Commander Bonapart, it's too risky to oversee operations in this."_

Commander Bonapart, a middle-aged man sporting a greying beard and a superior air, laughed off the Leo commander's concerns. "Lieutenant Akashi, you fool," he derided. "It's the best way to make our intentions known to both the enemy and the Specials. We don't need those _Specials_ to help us; they use these types of situations as an excuse to expand their power."

The elite Mobile Suit troops known as the Specials made great progress within the military of the United Earth Sphere Alliance in the expansion of armaments; however, there were many that disliked and distrusted the Specials. Colonel Seta Noriyasu, the young aristocratic founder of the Specials, is also an official of the mysterious Romefeller Foundation, financially backed by royalty and aristocrats who place importance on tradition. With this strong backing, Seta has focused on the development of Mobile Suits.

The Specials is an autonomous unit that not only supplies Mobile Suits to the Alliance, but has also started instructing the combat army corps. Their reputation on the battleground is excellent, earning them the right to act independently anytime, and at any battle they wished. However, it can't be denied that this status has angered the elder soldiers even more.

"These men confuse the battleground for some kind of aristocratic game," Commander Bonapart continued on his tirade, even though Lieutenant Akashi had long since tuned him out. "They want to kill so badly that they're starting things up themselves. We mustn't be persuaded by them; if we proceed cautiously then we can avoid unnecessary battles. I'll teach those bloodthirsty Specials a few things about _intelligent_ battle."

In the cockpit of her commander's unit, Alliance Lieutenant Yuuna Akashi sighed and slouched in her command seat, planting her left arm on her side console and resting her head against her fist. "Intelligent battle my ass," she muttered, glancing to her communications console to ensure she wasn't transmitting. "_You're_ the dumbass flying a dirigible in an age of Mobile Suits."

---

Lieutenant Uranami stood outside the Corsica base's command center, trying to maintain a semblance of military discipline as he took in the news he'd just been given. "So, Commander Bonapart isn't even here to see me."

"No, sir, sorry sir," the guard standing at the door answered. "He left some time ago to oversee the ceremonies."

Uranami chuckled and commented to himself, "I've heard that he doesn't like me."

Gripped with terror at displeasing the infamous Lightning Count, the guard stood even more upright and snapped a salute. "My apologies, sir!"

Uranami chuckled again. "Don't worry about it," he said. "I can't fault you for the way that man feels about me." He turned at the sound of an engine, in time to see a familiar figure on a motorcycle pull up behind him. "Well, Officer Haitani, it's been quite a while."

Demonstrating the fact that the two were old friends, Haitani remained on the motorcycle rather than step off and salute his superior officer. "You haven't changed a bit, Lieutenant Uranami," he said with a grin.

"So, have you got a machine for me?"

"Something like that, sir. I'll lead you there."

A short vehicle ride later brought Uranami and Haitani to an old storage hangar. Inside, Uranami was met with a white Mobile Suit, almost half again the size of most modern Mobile Suits, suspended in the air above the hangar floor, clutching its own unattached head unit in its right hand.

"This thing is massive," Uranami said.

"It's one of the original Mobile Suit prototype models," Haitani explained. "As you can see, it's two percent larger than a Leo unit. It's outdated, twenty years old, but when you showed me the data on Gundam, it reminded me of this unit, which is supposedly a historic artifact."

"You're assigned to Corsica, aren't you?" Uranami asked.

Haitani shook his head. "Not right now, no. I was a few duty rotations ago. I came here because this unit was here. This unit is the only one I can find that can compare with the Gundam data. I don't know how it's made, but I know it has to be this big to maintain its power. It exceeded their needs back then, so the Leo became the standard model." Haitani turned to regard the massive white Mobile Suit. "Tallgeese. That's what they call this thing."

"So this unit, if completed, can compete with Gundam?"

"Authorization has been given to take it from this storage facility," Haitani replied, tactfully avoiding voicing his own opinion on the unit's capabilities.

"Are you counting on dying, Haitani?" Uranami asked, turning to his old friend.

The other pilot smirked. "Everything I've done has been for the sake of the soldiers of tomorrow."

"Huh. You're a brave and noble soldier, Haitani. How many Gundams do you expect?"

"The maximum, as you always taught us."

"You can rest assured, then. There are four. One, at least, is not heading here."

"Lieutenant, I'd be grateful if we destroyed even one."

---

"_Squad Six, fan out and secure the commander's dirigible,"_ Yuuna ordered. _"Commander Bonapart, I urge you to reconsider."_

"_Tch, no enemies are coming."_

As he climbed into the cockpit of his Aries, Haitani said, "No, they _are_ coming."

"_Lieutenant Masayuki, I'm counting on you to cover the skies and keep us informed of any approaching enemies."_

Locking in his restraints and sealing the cockpit, Haitani pulled on his flight helmet and adjusted his boom mic. "You have my team's support, Lieutenant Akashi. No enemies will approach without us knowing it."

"_You idiots, what enemy would dare try attacking against this level of security?"_ Bonapart derided the ace pilots as the docking lines detached from his dirigible and the airship began to lift into the sky. Below, the Leos of Yuuna's squad patrolled the grounds diligently, sensors tuned outward for any sign of an enemy assault.

Across the base, within the storage hangar where the Tallgeese was being loaded onto Uranami's shuttle, the ace pilot's attention was drawn out to the east, where he spotted a small dot, obviously a Mobile Suit, approaching the base at a high rate of speed. He smiled humorlessly. "See for yourself."

"_Lieutenant Akashi, object approaching from the east at high speed!"_ a Leo pilot reported.

"_Keep your eyes open, folks, here they come! Spread out and get some cover!"_

The squad of Leos dispersed, taking cover behind buildings and sighting down their weapons as Anti-Mobile Suit turrets tracked the skies to the east. The squad of Specials Aries rotated in their formation to cover the other direction, as Haitani said, _"We'll cover the opposite end, Lieutenant Akashi. Give 'em hell."_

And then the enemy unit was suddenly _there_, the white-and-black Gundam bearing the scimitars as its weapon, in amongst the dug-in Leo troops. The scimitars flashed out at blinding speed, cleaving a Leo completely in half with a cross slash before the Mobile Suit turned, crossing its blades before it to block the incoming fire from a turret.

"_Get back!"_ Yuuna ordered as she fired her weapons at the Gundam. _"It's a close-range unit, so stay out of range of those blades! Keep moving and hammer it!"_

Haitani watched with tightly-closed lips as the Gundam moved from one Mobile Suit to the next, systemically decimating the Leo squad. Most of the Leos' fire was wide and panicked; Yuuna's shots, carefully-aimed as she paused between moving from cover to cover, all forced the Gundam to either evade or take the beams on the shield attached to its left arm. It seemed that Yuuna was the only competent pilot in her group. She had the skills to become a true ace, of that there was no doubt.

_She has to survive this battle. She's the kind of pilot we'll need to fight these things._ Nodding, reaching a decision, Haitani pulled his flight goggles down over his eyes. Inside a closed cockpit, they served no purpose, but they were part of tradition for Aries pilots, particularly squad leaders. "Specials, we'll start our counterattack at once," he ordered his men. "All units, go!"

"All_ units?"_ one of his men questioned. _"But there's only one of them here, sir."_

"It doesn't matter," Haitani said, a cold determination settling itself on his features. "One's all they need."

With no further argument, the dozen Aries of the Specials rose up from the tarmac, folding their legs into flight mode, and roared toward the battle. The Gundam had moved deeper into the base, closer to Commander Bonapart's dirigible, leaving a path of destruction in its wake. It sidestepped the blasts from an artillery unit and then stepped in to smash the blunt side of its right-handed scimitar into the guns' barrels and the artillery gunners, either ignorant or oblivious, were destroyed as the next volley of shells exploded in the crimped barrels; a quartet of Leos near the artillery guns fell victim to fractricide as the artillery units' explosion consumed them. The Gundam then turned toward a trio of VTOL fighter jets as they neared, unleashing a storm of 20mm Vulcan fire that decimated the oncoming fighters.

In the midst of the roiling explosion clouds and bullet trails, Bonapart's dirigible drifted as fast as it could away from the Mobile Suit, coordinators inside the airship screaming back and forth to each other in a panic.

"Calm down!" Bonapart ordered. "We know there's only one of them, so surround and destroy it!"

"It's not showing on the radar," a technician reported. "Switching to observation monitor." Bonapart leaned over the technician's console as a video image of the marauding Gundam appeared on the monitor. "Enemy confirmed!" Almost immediately, the Mobile Suit appeared to take notice of the observation drones and turned toward them, destroying them in a similar rain of 20mm fire.

Bonapart blinked. "This is what happens when you rely on equipment."

---

Within the cockpit of the Gundam, Shinobu watched calmly as a group of enemy tanks, obsolete weapons in this day and age, moved to encircle her. Individually, the tanks were worthless, but their combined fire could significantly damage her Mobile Suit. "The enemy commander had the right idea to surround and destroy the enemy, in this case," she murmured to herself and the battle recorder. "However, he shouldn't have committed his forces before understanding his enemy's capabilities."

Sheathing one of the scimitars on her Mobile Suit's back, Shinobu leaned over to scoop up a discarded 105mm Leo rifle, spraying the weapon across the clustered tanks, obliterating them in under thirty seconds.

It was after she had discarded the Leo rifle and was reaching for her scimitar again when the violet Leo shoulder-tackled her Mobile Suit from the side, slamming her into a barracks building. Pinning her beneath it, the Leo fired its shoulder cannons into her Gundam at point-blank range, scouring deep gouges into the chest armor of her Mobile Suit.

The enemy Leo discarded one of the short-barreled beam rifles it carried, reaching over her Gundam's shoulder to grab her own scimitar and bringing the weapon up in preparation to impale her Mobile Suit. Whether the enemy was aiming for her head or her cockpit she didn't know, and had no intention of finding out. She blocked the downward strike with the shield on her left arm, then slammed the shield back against the Leo, shoving the Mobile Suit back.

With her right arm now free, Shinobu swung the scimitar in that hand laterally, expecting to cleave her foe asunder, but her enemy evaded the attack with a timely vernier boost, pulling it back out of range except for its right arm, which was weighed down by the unfamiliar weapon, and thus neatly severed.

Bringing her Gundam back to its feet, Shinobu retrieved her stolen scimitar and stared across the way at her formidable opponent, the eye monitors of her Gundam glowing a fierce green.

---

Bonapart watched in a mix of apprehension and terror at the battle unfolding before him between the enemy Mobile Suit and Lieutenant Akashi. The fact that the pilot was brazen enough to close to melee range with the Gundam was one thing; she'd damn near taken the enemy by surprise and destroyed it in one fell swoop. "How could we have possibly made such a huge miscalculation?"

An Aries swooping into view obscured his view of the battle, and looking around, Bonapart noticed that the Specials unit had formed up around the dirigible. He heard Haitani order over the battlenet, _"Assist retreat of the commander's vessel. Everyone else, attack the enemy!"_

"_Sir!" "Yes, sir!"_

"What are you doing?" Bonapart shouted into the radio.

"_Given the enemy's strength, we won't make it out of here alive,"_ Haitani answered. _"Give appropriate instructions to the flight academies and the factories. For the soldiers of tomorrow..."_

It was then that the enormity of Bonapart's failure collapsed in upon him. He hung his head, ashamed to meet the eyes of his staff, and mutely uttered, "I'm sorry..."

"_Attack up close and stay focused!"_

"_Roger!" "Roger!"_

As five of the Aries led the dirigible away from battle, the other seven roared forward into battle to meet the enemy.

---

Across the base, Uranami listened to the distant battle in silence, tilting his head only slightly as Shirai approached him. "The Tallgeese has been finished loading," he reported. "We're ready to leave at any time."

"And Commander Bonapart?"

"We received a transmission confirming his escape. I was about to head over on the Leo to provide support."

"I wish you wouldn't do that," Uranami said as a particularly-violent explosion rattled the walkway they stood on. "I'm just about ready to take on the responsibility of reviving this Tallgeese to combat Gundam, and I'm going to need your help."

"Yes, sir."

---

"Lieutenant Akashi, fall back and retreat with the rest of the unit!" Haitani ordered as he and his wingmate roared in low at the enemy Mobile Suit, firing their chain rifles in a suppressive fire pattern at the mecha. It turned toward them and fired a burst from its 20mm cannons, which the two flight models nimbly rose above.

"_Yes, sir!"_ Yuuna replied, wasting no time in boosting her vernier engines and soaring away from the battlefield.

Haitani and his wingmate spiraled down toward the Mobile Suit, now focusing their fire on it, despite the fact that their shots pinged harmlessly off the armor. The two dropped down on either side of the Mobile Suit, out of range of its scimitars, as it turned and fired toward Haitani. The ace pilot roared to the side, out of the line of fire, but noticed too late the trap the enemy had set.

"Hunter, no, don't close!"

Too late; his wingmate had closed to attack the Gundam with its back turned, but Hunter had been the Gundam's target all along, now realized as it swiftly spun around and cleave his Aries in half with a precision stroke.

Despite himself, Haitani remained calm in the face of his wingmate's death, as he and the other five Aries surrounded the Gundam on all sides. Calmly, the Mobile Suit took stock of its situation, then turned its head to fire the Vulcan guns at Haitani. However, all that came of it was the buzz of the gun barrels spinning and a puff of smoke; the Mobile Suit had expended all its ammunition.

"_He's out of bullets! We did it!"_

Haitani stared at the Mobile Suit dispassionately; this one was tricky, and he was determined not to lose any more men to a simple trap. "Don't let your guard down."

"_I'll show you what the Specials are made of!"_ the previous pilot shouted over an open channel as he charged toward the Gundam.

"Get back in formation, you fool!" Haitani shouted. "We can't afford a mistake at this point!"

The reckless Aries, heedless of the orders Haitani had issued, rose up over the enemy Mobile Suit, seemingly intent on bashing the Gundam into submission with its rifle. Before it could attack, however, the Aries suddenly stopped in its tracks, still carried forward by momentum. As Shinobu watched inside her Gundam, a hole appeared in the head of the Aries, created by a high-caliber sniper round that passed harmlessly over her own Gundam's head. The Aries collapsed bonelessly to the ground before her.

That was when all hell broke loose. From the west, a heavy barrage of rifle fire poured into the fracas, catching off-guard and obliterating a pair of Aries. Turning her Gundam in the direction of the incoming fire, Shinobu spotted a large force of unknown Mobile Suits built like large turtles shifting their fire to suppressive. None of their shots were hitting her, but that may have been as much due to accident as intent on their part.

A new signal roared in out of the northwest, a red-and-white Mobile Suit with missile pods attached to the shoulders and legs, and a huge Gatling gun in place of its left arm. The Mobile Suit raised its gun arm and fired as it bore in, the recoil of the massive weapon enough to visibly reduce the Mobile Suit's forward speed. Heavy 120mm cannon rounds ripped through two of the remaining three Aries, but Haitani was quick to boost his Aries upward away from the field of fire, spraying his chain rifle down at the two enemy Suits.

"Come get me, you monster!" he screamed over an open frequency.

Shinobu obliged him. Locking her scimitars into their special configuration on her shield to form a pincer, she kicked in her vernier boosters and roared up toward the Aries, clamping the pincer around its midsection and applying pressure.

Haitani swore, a cold sweat running over his body as he realized the imminence of his death. The light armor of the Aries began to crumple immediately, crushing the cockpit hatch and viewscreens and allowing brilliant light from outside his craft to stream in at him. "Well, I wanted to find out what this thing could handle..." he murmured to himself.

Even as she applied more crushing force to the pincer, Shinobu lowered her head within the cockpit of her Mobile Suit, a tear streaking down from her left eye as she transmitted a single word to Haitani over a tight-beam open frequency: _"Sorry."_

"A...girl...? It's...wrong..." Haitani whispered in disbelief, an instant before the fusion reactor detonated, consuming the ace Specials pilot in a searing blaze of white fire.

Shinobu disengaged her scimitars and sheathed them over the back of her Gundam as she landed, turning to face the red-and-white unit, and its large support army. All 31 Mobile Suits regarded her silently, unmoving. She divided her attention between her viewscreens and a tactical readout of the other unit. "It'll still have a full load of ammunition after such a small skirmish," she mused quietly, "but that pilot... I imagine he doesn't rely on his firearms as much as it seems."

Just then, Uranami's shuttle blasted out of the underground hangar at maximum speed, having waited for the battle to die down to make his escape. Shinobu instinctively looked over toward it. "No, I let an OZ aircraft get away!"

It wasn't until her sensors shrieked at her that she realized her mistake in taking her attention away from the other Mobile Suit. By the time she turned back to it, it was already upon her, its Gatling gun jettisoned behind it, revealing a normal arm underneath, and a combat knife swung out from beneath its right arm driving up into the shoulder joint of her own Gundam. The heavy shriek of Gundanium resisting the sharp blade forced her to wince.

Fortunately for her, her enemy paused as well upon realizing that his attack hadn't literally disarmed her; he clearly wasn't expecting her Suit to be made of Gundanium. Taking advantage of the pause, Shinobu drove her Gundam's left arm up underneath her foe's right, locking the arm in place and preventing it from having use of its knife. She applied pressure to the joint lock and received an energy cascade as part of the flexible material between the upper and lower arm gave way.

Unfortunately, Mobile Suit pilots didn't feel pain that they would if the joint hold was applied to them, so the red unit immediately drove its knee up into Shinobu's Gundam, forcing her back a step. She gave it two additional steps, then brought back her right fist. Judging by the fact that she hadn't ripped her opponent's arm _off_, it was also made of Gundanium, but if she struck it hard enough in the head, she'd destroy its sensors and control unit.

Her enemy read her movement perfectly, bringing up its own left hand to catch her right, and applying pressure of its own to her unit's hand. She watched as new energy cascades appeared, and knew that if this was a physical confrontation between pilots, she'd be looking at no less than three broken fingers. The two Mobile Suits strained against one another for several moments, until Shinobu finally realized something.

Both their Mobile Suits were made out of Gundanium. That meant both of them had come from space. She wasn't aware of there being other pilots with the same mission as her, but if there _were_ other such pilots, then this one was probably one of them, and that made this pilot an ally.

"This isn't right..." she whispered to herself. "We shouldn't be fighting."

Reaching down to her console, she keyed in the commands to power down her Mobile Suit, then unsealed the cockpit hatch and opened it up, blinking as the bright light struck her eyes. Stepping out onto the lowered hatch, she looked up at the other Mobile Suit's head and declared, "You and I should not be fighting each other."

It took a few moments, but then she saw the active lights vanish from the other Mobile Suit's 'eyes,' before its cockpit opened as well, revealing a dark-skinned, blonde-haired young girl who looked to be no older than Shinobu, wearing anonymous military fatigues. The young pilot stepped out onto her hatch, wearing the perfect expression of a scolded child, and meekly raised her hands.

Shinobu couldn't help but smile, even as she noticed the other pilot's support units all repeating the hand-raising motion. "Put your hands down," she said gently. "I was the first one to surrender and come out, remember?"

The other girl lowered her hands and looked up at Shinobu in momentary awe, then a wide smile broke out on her face as well.

---

Far out in Sagami Bay, Kitsune and Naru had traded in the fishing trawler for a massive deep-sea recovery vessel. Already laid out on the deck was Kitsune's Deathscythe Gundam, and from the wheelhouse of a recovery crane, Kitsune watched as Naru's own Gundam likewise breached the surface. With both Gundams now recovered, Kitsune looked over toward where she had last seen Naru and said, "Okay, I brought yours up too, just like I promise... Hey, what're you doin'?"

Naru, her leg already set in a temporary splint and brace until proper medical facilities could be reached, was leaning her upper arm, above the fracture in that arm, against one of the ship's railings, and was steadily applying pressure to her lower arm, below the fracture. The grimace on her face indicated that what she was doing was fairly painful.

"Oh, no," Kitsune muttered. "She's not about to..."

A loud snap, followed by a few grinding sounds, sent Kitsune into a full-body shiver. She looked on, a disgusted grimace on her own face, as Naru set a wrench against her arm to act as a splint and then wrapped it in place with medical tape.

"God, I don't think I can take too much more of that..." the fox lady sighed. "She just goes and _grinds_ a broken bone back into place like it ain't nothin'. Makes me wanna never pop my neck again."

Limping on her mending leg, Naru crossed the deck to stare down at her Gundam, suspended by cables in the water, which seemed to be staring right back at her.

_**To be continued...**_

---

_Kitsune and I depart for another battleground. In the meantime, Motoko heads for the Mahora training base, in southeast Japan. At the base are OZ's advanced Space Taurus Mobile Suits, as well as Instructor Kanako Urashima, an instructor of top pilots. There, Instructor Kanako encounters a nightmarish incident._

_Next, on Shooting Stars Episode 4: __**The Mahora Nightmare.**_


	5. Episode 4: The Mahora Nightmare

**A/N:** Forget what I said in the opening A/N of the last chapter, because I forgot what I meant by the "why" when I said that you have to figure out what I put in and why. I really should write these things down. But I digress. I now come armed with a full knowledge of all three anime series of Full Metal Panic and a whole damn _week's_ worth of reading epic FMP fiction. _It will show_. No further news.

* * *

In southeastern Japan, half an hour's transit from the small nation's capital, existed a medium-sized township named Mahora. Once, in the distant, peaceful past, it had been a collegiate town, built to support the half-dozen nationally-acclaimed schools, ranging from primary to post-secondary, that had once existed there. Unfortunately, times had changed, and as the UESA gained control of territory after territory, Mahora changed. The cheerful students who had once filled the streets had been replaced with UESA pilot trainees, the schools now changed to flight academies.

The buildings and facilities of Mahora had been extensively changed, bright and cheery student dormitories replaced with spartan military barracks, tram cars and personal vehicles replaced with Mobile Suit carrier trucks and armored vehicles. One thing about Mahora had remained unchanged, lasting through the years, and that was the massive, twenty-story tall World Tree looming in the center of the military base.

Far northwest of the base, Lieutenant Uranami's shuttle cruised over the forested tracks of eastern Russia, en route to the Mahora military base. Within the Mobile Suit bay of the blue-colored aerospace craft, the Tallgeese Mobile Suit rested silently, a vessel of great power, waiting for the day it would be called upon to serve.

"We just received word on the Corsica base," Shirai reported from the pilot's seat of the shuttle. "The enemy units left before the reinforcements arrived, after destroying fifty-five percent of the factory."

In the center seat behind the pilot chairs, Uranami sat as still as though he were carved out of a block of ice, his mask covering half his face, what wasn't covered held completely impassive, lips pressed together in a thin line, tightly clenching the written after-action report of the battle at Corsica in his right hand. _Haitani..._ he thought to himself bitterly, _thanks for filling me in on yet another two enemy machines._

"Lieutenant Uranami, Mahora Base is on the line," the copilot/communications officer said, then connected the call.

Uranami looked up as the center console video display came online, displaying the face of a female officer with black hair, clad in the standard uniform of pilot trainees, saluting toward him. Despite his grief at the death of his friend, Uranami couldn't stop a smirk from twitching the corner of his lip at the woman's deference to him, even though they shared the same rank.

After a moment, the woman lowered her salute, then leaned forward closer to the communications station. _"It's been quite a while, Lieutenant Uranami."_ No one else would've caught the subtle inflection she applied to his name, which demonstrated to both of them how much she hated using that alias to refer to him.

"You're looking good, as usual, Kanako," he answered calmly. The standard greeting, the standard answer. It was their little game, a touchstone, a reminder of each to the other of who they truly were, a reminder to her of what his true goals were, to him of what lengths to which she was willing to go to support him. Kanako Urashima; it amazed him that she could continue to use her true name, given the stigma placed on it by the Alliance; was perhaps the closest person in the world to him.

"_I hear you've been pretty busy these days,"_ she said, her expression sobering. _"Rumors about the 'Lightning Count' have made it as far as down here at Mahora."_

Beneath his helmet, he rolled his eyes, even though it wouldn't be seen through the polarized lenses in his helmet. "I don't like where the rumors are heading," he told her. "I become a greater target of enemies, and allies expect more than I can handle."

Kanako smiled knowingly. _"There's no situation that you couldn't handle, Lieutenant,"_ she said, then turned away from the communications station to look at something out of his range of vision. _"I think rumors are great, you know? Have you heard any about me?"_

"I've heard that the classes of pilots you graduate are amongst the top aces of the Alliance," he told her. "And on top of that, your own piloting skills are superior." She hadn't come back into the viewing range of the communications station, and if he knew her at all, it had to be because she was turning red from his compliment. "But you used to hate wars," he continued. "So why all the effort now?"

"_My effort?"_ Kanako asked, a pause indicating that she was shrugging. _"My effort comes from my love of outer space."_ There was another delay, this one longer, before she said, _"My apologies, Lieutenant, but I'm needed in the zero-gee simulator."_

"Of course, Lieutenant Kanako," he answered. "I'll see you when we arrive tomorrow."

She made some sort of sound of assent, then the transmission ended.

---

The zero-gravity simulator was located one hundred meters below what had once been a university's engineering department, making use of the laws of centrifugal force and differently-polarized magnets to simulate a perfect no-gravity environment perfect for space Mobile Suit training. For the purposes of the current exercise, the trainees would be placed in replicas of the Taurus command couch with variable-direction thrusters mounted to each of the corners. Control levers mounted onto the trainee couches would control the thrusters, allowing the trainees to practice maneuvering in zero gravity without potentially damaging multi-million dollar Mobile Suits.

"_We've reached the hundred meter mark,"_ the operations room controller announced. _"Null gravity chamber is fully online."_

"Right," Kanako said, drifting independently near one wall of the room, her arms crossed over her chest. "Commence the final test for space Mobile Suit operations."

There were five trainees in this last class. Their skill in handling the Mobile Suit training couches was decent, but the reason they were the last in the class was because their academic scores were abysmal. The five trainees were also all female, something of an oddity considering that the Alliance generally did not employ female Mobile Suit pilots in combat.

Kanako watched as the trainees maneuvered their trainers through the large space in the middle of the chamber. Two of them immediately stood out as exceptional pilots, one sandy-haired young woman whose eyes seemed to be perpetually squinting was literally piloting rings around her fellow trainees, and she seemed to move extremely rapidly from one side of the chamber to another despite keeping her training couch on the low speed setting; it almost seemed like she was teleporting from point to point. The other pilot that stood out was a heterochromatic young lady with flame red hair, she lacked the finesse of the other pilot, but she more than made up for it in the way she managed to manhandle her couch through the assigned maneuvers; this one would probably end up needing quite a few cockpit panels replaced.

A third pilot, a young woman of Chinese descent, somehow obviously so despite her blonde hair and tanned complexion, seemed content to simply spin her training couch in place, until she caught Kanako staring pointedly at her, at which point she sent her couch through the prescribed maneuvers with ease.

The last two pilots weren't so promising. Their control and maneuvering was poor, and they collided with each other on numerous occasions, and would have collided with their fellow trainees, had the other three not the skill to avoid the collisions.

Kanako let out an irritated growl. "Ayase, Sasaki, what the hell are you two doing?" she demanded. "You shouldn't be having any trouble at this speed. You've never had this much trouble in the standing simulators."

"But it's different in a real Mobile Suit!" the pink-haired Makie Sasaki complained.

"It's not a real Mobile Suit, de gozaru," the speedy pilot trainee corrected, spinning her training couch in a standing rotation.

"Like Kaede say," the Chinese girl added. Though a gifted pilot and an extraordinary unarmed combatant, she was rather lacking in the language skills, though everyone was, by now, familiar with her 'pidgin' English. "Is trainer couch, aru."

"Lieutenant Uranami is coming to the base," Kanako said. "So I hope you manage not to embarrass yourself."

"Lieutenant Uranami, hm?" the dour-faced Yue Ayase said, bringing her trainer to a complete halt. If nothing else, she'd managed to easily master the art of properly distributing the thruster force of her couch to negate all movement and drift. The other four trainees and the experienced instructor expected her to say something more, but she merely turned her couch and began to clumsily go through her maneuvers.

"As expected of Baka Leader," the redhead commented as Yue went through her maneuvers. Yue was neither stupid nor a poor pilot, she merely hated to study and put forth effort, even in hands-on training. She would've preferred training in real Mobile Suits.

_Oniichan..._ Kanako thought to herself, not a little wistfully. _It's been one year and twenty-two days..._

---

It was late in the evening as Motoko stood atop the mountainous ridge that overlooked the Mahora training base. From this distance, even within visual range of the base, she could not hear any noise from the base, leaving her in a natural silence that was absolute and unbroken, save for the screeching call of an eagle on the hunt. She brought her gaze up to observe the bird of prey, watching as it soared and swooped on thermal updrafts from the forest below her.

A faint smile curled her lips. She was not unlike that eagle, preying upon the unsuspecting rodents of the world, soaring far above them, striking with neither warning nor mercy. And, like the screeching bird of prey, it was now time for her to hunt. Taking one last moment to observe the bird in flight, she turned and seated herself on the back of a remake of the old Kawasaki ZZR1400 motorcycle she had purchased and modified to be more rugged and durable.

She took a moment to check and secure the necessary equipment she had placed in the saddle bags installed behind and under the seat, then swung her leg over the new leather, turned on the engine, and throttled the idling engine. Twisting the accelerator under her hand, she roared off the edge of the plateau she had been waiting upon, driving her motorcycle down the inclined sides of the mountain, not even giving her Gundam a second's glance as she roared past, the Mobile Suit sitting beneath a camouflage cover underneath the tree line, waiting for her to return and put it to use...

---

"So then we've lost sight of him?" Uranami asked.

Shirai nodded and handed a printed map readout back to his superior officer, detailing a flight path of a Mobile Suit that ended over the Sea of Japan. "It's the only Mobile Suit we've been able to confirm the location of, and we lost track of it once it passed over the Sea of Japan."

"It's obvious he's heading for the Taurus Suits at the Mahora base," Uranami said. "Those Suits have a much higher strategic rating right now than the Alliance command center in Tokyo."

"The Alliance is taking far too many unnecessary risks by being so liberal with its information," Shirai said with a scowl, shaking his head. "Even civilian children know that the Taurus Mobile Suits are being constructed at the Mahora base."

Uranami smiled thinly. "And fancy that, we just happen to be on the way there," he said. "I imagine that Kanako is the only one who will tolerate an annoying lieutenant such as myself."

There was a moment of silence on Shirai's part as he glanced toward the copilot, then asked of his superior, "The two of you graduated together from the Mahora training academy, didn't you?" It was much more than that, though; being one of the few people who knew Uranami's true identity, Shirai likewise knew the true connection between Kanako and Uranami.

"I'm surprised you knew," Uranami answered calmly, playing along with the deception.

"Of course I do," Shirai said. "Everyone knows about the top two pilots of all time to ever graduate from the Mahora academy. I also know that you, Lieutenant, were the top pilot."

Another faint smile graced his face. "She always did her best to come in second, so that I would look all that much better," he explained. "It seems she'll be helping me out once again."

---

Early in the morning the next day, the final class of graduating pilots stood in perfect formation on the tarmac in their newly-delivered uniforms. With their final exams completed, they were now fully-fledged commissioned officers of the Specials Flight Group. Their black-and-white uniforms, a stark contrast to the olive drab uniforms of the Alliance and their standard Mobile Suit pilots, stood as a testament to this fact.

Kanako, resplendent in her own uniform complete with ceremonial saber and service dress white shoulder cloak, stood before the formation of pilots, gazing one at a time at each pilot in turn. Scattered throughout the formation were the five remedial trainees she had completed the final examination of the previous night; the five new pilots were affectionately known as the 'Baka Rangers,' a throwback to a centuries-old cartoon series, by the other pilots. She was pleased that she had not been forced to fail any of them; they had an endearing quality to them, and she left herself a mental note to recommend that the five of them receive new assignments to the same battle group. The Baka Rangers had potential to become an effective Mobile Suit combat team; they were already more than capable of playing off each others' strengths and covering each others' deficiencies on the ground.

"Today, your tenure as a pilot candidate has come to an end," she told the assembled twenty-six students. "Today, you have become a member of the elite Specials Mobile Suit force."

As she spoke those words, the doors of the hangar behind the newly-minted officers ground open, and twenty-six Mobile Suit transport trucks rolled out onto the tarmac, their cargo beds deployed into the upright launching position, each truck carrying a brand-new OZ-12SMS Taurus prototype Mobile Suit, the crafts' black armor gleaming underneath the morning sun. The carrier trucks rolled out onto the tarmac, the drivers assembling the Mobile Suits in their own formation behind Kanako to match that of the pilots before her.

"The enemy is targeting your prototype Taurus," she told them. "Your first mission as a member of OZ is to get these Mobile Suits off the base."

"Shouldn't that be left to the transport unit?" one of the pilots, a male with a mouth bigger than his brain, asked.

Kanako's response was immediate and harsh. She crossed to stand before the loudmouthed pilot, and neatly backhanded him across the mouth. The suddenness and intensity of it caused many of the other pilots to flinch in response. "I didn't train any pilots who couldn't handle their own machines!" she snarled to the man. "Prepare to leave immediately! Get moving!"

"Alpha Flight, fall out!" the flight commander snapped immediately.

Kanako watched dispassionately, struggling to bring her notorious temper back under control, as the twenty-six pilots abandoned their formation and rushed back to the barracks to pack their belongings and prepare for departure. To help her focus, she brought out a datapad and stared at her notations on its screen. Once the pilots had returned and boarded their Mobile Suits, they'd receive their deployment orders in the air. They'd all be gone inside an hour, and later assignments to this training base notwithstanding, it would be the last any of them would see of the Mahora training base.

A flash of color and light to the side drew her attention, and she looked to her right in time to see Uranami's shuttle touch down on the primary runway, the sound of the wheels screeching on the concrete reaching her from even as far away as she was. She smiled faintly. Once this matter of getting the new pilots and their prototypes off the base was dealt with, she'd be able to devote all her attention to the mysterious lieutenant and whatever it was that brought him halfway around the world to her base.

---

Delays. How she hated them. The problem with prototypes was that they were experimental systems that were still undergoing testing. Half of the Taurus Mobile Suits had gotten out of the base without a hitch, and then the remaining half had promptly decided that they were going to have startup mechanical failures. Determining the causes of those failures, as there were multiple causes and they all connected, had been a three-hour affair, and repairing them had taken the rest of the day. Finally, the last half of the pilots and their Mobile Suits had departed in the early evening, just before sunset.

An hour after dark, Kanako trudged into the combination bar/recreation room, her head pounding from the events of the day. The flashing, color-alternating lights of the room did not ease her troubles any, and she winced immediately upon entry, pressing the heel of her left hand against her closed eye, attempting and failing to grind out the pain. She no longer even knew why she'd suggested this meeting place to Uranami.

"Penny for your thoughts, Instructor?" Uranami asked, offering her a shot glass, which she stared at dubiously for a moment. He smiled at this. "It's nonalcoholic. Just a little something I mixed up that might help relieve your stress."

"Thank you," Kanako said, taking the glass and knocking back its contents in a single pass, then setting the empty shot glass on an empty table and approaching the bar that he had returned to, where he was slowly nursing a wine glass filled with the same contents. As she neared, she whispered under her breath, "Oniichan..."

He waited for Kanako to take a seat on a barstool, then said, "So, Kanako, how have you been?"

"As well as ever," she answered, resting her arms on the bar's polished surface. "Pilot training, year after year after year. Occasional missions to the front." She glanced sideways toward him. "What about you?"

"The same, also," he said, twirling his wine glass, watching the red liquid contents swirl within. "Though more missions and less training on my part."

Kanako laughed, then sighed happily. Always amongst his superiors, subordinates, and other allies, Uranami was forced to remain the eloquent, well-educated aristocrat that he had created as his persona. Only a select few, among them herself, Shirai, and Colonel Noriyasu, would see or had ever seen the less-eloquent side of him, the mask of personality he wore as easily as the mask of plasteel on his head.

"Haruka called the other day," she announced suddenly.

"Oh?" Uranami asked, an eyebrow raising underneath his helmet.

"Yes, some of those new tenants she was talking about have arrived," she said. "Three of the girls have made it out there, the other two should be arriving within the next couple of days."

"I see," he said, then sipped from his glass. "How interesting. And aren't they all Colonists? I hope that they'll enjoy the time they spend on the Earth."

"She also mentioned something to me about one of the girls," Kanako continued, carefully watching the ace pilot. "She seemed convinced that one of the new tenants was the girl that my brother made a promise to, when they were children, to attend Tokyo University together."

Uranami's face betrayed nothing. "Is _that_ so?" he asked, a hint of idle curiosity in his voice. "I'm sure your brother will be most pleased to learn of that knowledge."

A frown creased Kanako's face at that response. She knew there was the potential that a person who held a false alias the way he did could sometimes become so accustomed to it that it would literally become their reality, but she thought she would have spotted the warning signs that such a thing was happening to...

Wait. She narrowed her eyes and looked closer as she noticed the very faint smirk on his lips, and the barest glimpse at a brown eye hidden behind the lenses as a flashing strode managed to illuminate just barely through the polarized lenses. He was doing it on purpose, the dog. Her head came up slightly as she realized that even here, in the recreation room, it wasn't safe for him to let down his guard. She nodded slowly in realization.

"So what time will you be slipping out the rest of the prototype Taurus?" he asked, breaking the long silence.

"0700," she answered automatically.

"That's cutting it rather close, don't you think?" he asked, curious at this timing. "Wouldn't a pre-dawn extraction be a better idea?"

She shook her head. She had long considered her choice timing, carefully weighing the pros and cons of each potential time. "The reports I've received concerning the new enemy MS indicates that they won't appear on radar. With that disadvantage, it's better if we don't give them the cover of darkness as well. I've also ordered additional sentries to guard the perimeter tonight."

He nodded slowly, considering the tactical value of her decision. "That's the best strategy in this situation," he told her, finishing off the contents of his wine glass. "Good thinking, Kanako."

She smiled faintly, flushing red slightly at the praise. "Thank you, Lieutenant."

Another tip of his head, then he looked to the side at one of the rows of flashing lights providing the unusual illumination. "By the way, this room sure is different than how I remember it."

"You can blame that on my last graduating class," she said. "There's something wild and energetic about that bunch, and this is the result of one of their midterm passing parties. I decided it was a nice touch, so I let it stand."

Uranami's expression sobered, and he became very still. "Don't get too attached, or parting will hurt," he said.

She likewise stilled, reading not just a double entendre, but a _multiple_ entendre. There were three warnings in one, if not more, contained in that one simple sentence. First and foremost warning her as an instructor not to get too attached to her students, because they would move on to the different battlefields of the world. Second as a soldier, a personal warning to avoid too much attachment to her fellow soldiers, a warning just recently underscored by the death of his own friend Haitani. And third, it was a much more subtle warning from the man beneath the mask, not to become too complacent with her status in life and things she took for granted, because there was never any way of knowing when it could get ripped out from beneath her.

"Thanks for your concern, but my soldiers will never fall in battle," she responded. "They've been trained not to overdo things." It was another double entendre. She was telling him that she knew full well the danger of being attached.

On the wall behind Kanako, the base's phone line began to vibrate. She turned on her stool and picked it up. "Urashima," she said. She was silent for a moment, then said, "Yes, one moment." Lowering the receiver, she turned to Uranami and said, "Lieutenant Shirai on the line for you."

Standing from his seat, Uranami walked toward her, accepted the phone receiver with a grateful nod, and then leaned against the wall. "What is it, Shirai?"

"_Sir, the technicians here are just as surprised as I am,"_ Shirai all but shouted into the phone. In the background, Uranami could hear engines, and assumed that the vernier boosters were being tested. _"This Mobile Suit is far more advanced than we initially thought, and it should be completed sooner than we expected as well. Even so, it'll still be another month or two."_

Despite himself, Uranami smiled. That time that it would take for the Mobile Suit to be completed would be downtime for him. "Thanks for letting me know," he said. "Sounds good. Keep me informed."

As the call ended, Uranami became distinctly aware of a metallic clinking sound and an on-and-off vibration on his hip. He glanced back as he placed the receiver back on his hook, watching as Kanako rocked her ceremonial saber back and forth, causing her ceremonial scabbard to clink against his own. He smiled faintly and refrained from turning around. It was just another of her habits.

---

2300 hours. From her position beneath the World Tree, Motoko listened as her wristwatch beeped to signify the change of the hour. Two owls sat roosting on the lowest branch of the tree, thirty feet up, off to her side. She glanced up at them for a moment, then raised her left arm to view the time, lowered that arm, brought up her right hand, and depressed her thumb onto the red button she held in her hand.

At first, there seemed to be no response. Then the ground rumbled beneath her feet and she heard a muffled pop. Soon, however, roiling black clouds began to belch out of the pilot trainee barracks as the strategically-placed explosives detonated in sequence. The blasts ripped through the barracks, gutting the building as ardent flames poured out into the night. Moments later, the same fate befell the primary security center of the city-base, destroying the control consoles monitoring the sophisticated security equipment; far simpler to destroy the control units and leave the myriad of sensors intact than attempt to destroy them all.

Even still, the security was remarkably on the ball. Not moments after the explosions had died out, spotlights in guard towers activated and swept the grounds, the keening wail of an attack siren filled the late night air, and patrol Leos were marching throughout the base, security spotlights activated and searching.

Motoko smiled humorlessly; she'd spent days studying the base's security drills, and knew exactly how, where, and when to travel to avoid detection. It was far too easy, especially for a woman of her skills. Raising her motorcycle from the ground, she climbed onto the vehicle, revved up the engine, and roared off down the streets.

---

Red emergency lights bathed the instructor dormitory in a harsh glare as Kanako threw open her dorm room and stepped out into the hallway. Other instructors and officers were rushing through the halls already. "What's going on!?" she called out to the stream of personnel. "What's happened!?"

One of her friends and fellow instructors, an officer from the former United Kingdom who was rather young for a combat instructor, paused and answered her, his accent readily apparent, "We're under attack! The pilot trainee dormitory has taken the worst hit!"

"No!" Kanako shouted, mostly to herself. Presence of mind caused her to reach back to the bookshelf just beside her door and grab her issue 9mm Beretta before she dashed out of the instructor dorms and made it to the pilot dorms in record time.

The sight that waited for her was a chilling one. The trainee dorms had all but imploded on themselves from the force and number of explosions that had gone off within, choking that entire area of the city-base with noxious grey smoke and ash. Scattered amongst the debris of the building were the still bodies of the remaining classes of pilot trainees, many of them clad in their night wear.

Despite her years of combat service, Kanako couldn't help herself as she drew to a halt at the edge of the devastated area, pressing a hand to her mouth as she took in the scene of carnage and death. "This is..."

Shaking her head of any distracting thoughts, she forcefully pushed her emotions aside, taking advantage of years of training to properly handle this situation. Slowly, watching for any weak floor panels or debris that could bring her down, Kanako made her way into the carnage and knelt at the nearest body, checking for vitals. It was a grim, heartwrenching task, but it was vital to check for survivors.

Just as she began to rise from the first man, dead beyond any shadow of a doubt, she heard a low groaning sound over the alarm klaxons. She immediately snapped her head up, locating the source of the sound. It came from a pilot trainee trapped beneath a section of concrete. She could tell even before she reached him that his prospects of survival were poor; the debris had crushed both his legs and probably caused internal bleeding as well.

Kneeling down beside the man, Kanako slid her arm under his shoulders and gently raised him up, stopping when she saw an expression of pain on his face. He opened his eyes slowly, recognizing her immediately. "In...structor..." he breathed.

This set Kanako's lips into a thin line. Lucidity with that much bodily harm was also a bad sign. It meant that his brain was already beginning to shut down. She said nothing, willing her eyes not to water, trying her damnedest to bring her soldier facade to the forefront. She looked around, desperately hoping that a medical kit was close at hand; she could not save him, but she at least wanted to ease his pain.

"Instructor, I...." he murmured, his eyes glazing over. "I wanted to.....go into space...."

The pilot trainee shook violently in her arms, then abruptly stopped, his head slumping down into his chest, which itself was still. Clenching her jaw, Kanako raised her right hand and slowly closed the man's eyes. She remained in this position for a few moments, then growled, turned toward the nearest live soldiers that were in the area, and gave her orders.

"Find the enemy immediately! Shoot on sight and show no mercy!"

---

"We're expecting a Mobile Suit battle," Kanako told the base commander as they strode into the command center. Technicians inside were hard at work coordinating the defense and rescue forces, generating a hum of background chatter that did little to dispel the chill creeping through the instructor. Her eyes immediately snapped over to one of the soldiers. "How's Lieutenant Uranami?"

The man glanced back over his shoulder at her. "The south hangar area hasn't been attacked," he answered. "Only the pilot trainee barracks and security substation have been targeted."

Kanako frowned. "Why attack the trainees?" she asked herself. "This enemy obviously has had time to reconnoiter the base, so why not destroy the pilot dormitories and the Mobile Suit hangars?"

Wisely, the technician did not respond to her vocalized musings. Another technician turned in his seat. "Ma'am, loading the remaining Taurus prototypes will take at least another thirty minutes."

"No delays this time!" she snapped off. "I'll take command of our Mobile Suit forces."

As she departed the command center, she could hear the chatter of the pilots already on search duty: _"No sign of the enemy at the east gate." "Nothing suspicious at the water reclamation plant." "Deploying strobe flares now." "There's no sign of any enemies anywhere!"_

---

She hadn't bothered to return to her dorm to grab any proper uniform. She'd simply have to fight this battle in her uniform pants and a night shirt. Fitting an Aries-specific headset communicator in place, Kanako climbed into her customized, green-painted OZ-07AMS Aries and brought the Mobile Suit online. She frowned as the system ran through its initialization routine. "It can only be an ambush..." she mused to herself. "Why else target the trainee dorms, not the true targets. Clearly, they must be seeking to provoke us into acting irrationally."

She nodded her head slowly. It was making a scary sort of sense, now. The enemy sends in one sacrificial lamb to attack the base, drawing out the Mobile Suit troops who, angered by the heinous terrorist act, would follow the bait directly to the wolves. A grin broke Kanako's face. Now it was a game of outfoxing the foxes.

Kanako's Aries was customized in more ways than just its paint job. It sported the more durable but lighter-weight titanium-A armor, finely-tuned vernier engines that rated a 5.7 percent increase in performance over other Aries models, and a number of enhanced cockpit systems, including voice-recognition and control software, and a rudimentary AI. The cockpit system enhancements had been provided by yet another of the shadowy organizations, but this one was only ostensibly-connected to OZ. She couldn't remember the organization's name, but she seemed to recall that it was named after some kind of fictional metal.

"Connect with the primary base mainframe, determine if thermal sensors were damaged in the attack."

"_Working, Lieutenant,"_ the neutral voice of the AI responded. A moment later, it continued, _"Thermal sensors have received only minor damage in the attack. They are functioning at 97.84 percent of full capacity."_

"Good," Kanako said, reaching up and pulling the lever to seal her cockpit hatch. "Activate thermal imaging scan, search for small heat sources between the size of a human up to the size of an automobile, cross-reference any matches with on-going IFF scan, display any heat sources that _do not_ match with local IFF frequencies on the secondary monitor."

"_Working, Lieutenant."_

Not waiting for the computer to finish its scan, Kanako detached her Mobile Suit from its docking lines and feathered the throttle up, guiding the Aries out of the hangar without baking the remainder of its occupants in a vernier thruster backwash. Once she was clear of the hangar, she oriented her MS skyward and boosted the thrusters, roaring up above the base.

"_Lieutenant, heat source anomaly detected. Now displaying on secondary monitor."_

The pilot instructor glanced toward the small monitor in the upper right of her display screens, which showed a multi-colored blotch of heat traveling at a high rate of speed along one of the secondary thoroughfares out of the base. "Give me a bearing and range on the target," she ordered.

"_Bearing two-two-five, range one hundred thirty-seven meters to target,"_ the computer immediately answered.

Leveling off her altitude at three hundred feet, Kanako swung her Mobile Suit toward the target and boosted her thrusters, roaring off toward it. As she did so, she connected to the command center. "I've located a possible target heading northwest out of the base, toward the forest," she reported. "I suspect that the attack on the trainee dormitory was bait to lure us into a trap by well-prepared enemy forces."

"_Exceptional work, __Lieutenant,"_ the base commander said. _"Recommendations?"_

"Continue work on loading and removing the Taurus as soon as possible," she postulated, tactics and strategy swirling about her mind as her Mobile Suit roared over the streets of the city-base, her eyes glued to the ground for any sign of her elusive foe. "Deploy most of our Leo forces to defend the hangars. Station our _Aries_ troops in points of concealment around the base. I will chase down the target and fall into the trap. I will then lure their forces back toward the base, where _we_ will spring _our_ trap."

There was a moment's delay, then the commander's voice came back, _"Understood. We'll follow your plan, Lieutenant Kanako, with one modification. Take two Aries with you to lure the enemy in. They may get suspicious if we don't deploy sufficient response forces."_

She bit back an immediate rebuttal. Normal Aries weren't as maneuverable as hers, other pilots weren't as reactive as she was. In all likelihood, the other two pilots would die when the enemy sprung their trap. She wasn't entirely certain that _she_ could survive whatever was waiting out there. But she tamped down on her instincts, and answered, "Understood."

"_Lieutenant Kanako, we have caught up to the target,"_ her Mobile Suit's AI reported.

"Out_standing_," she whispered to herself, then manipulated control levers. Her Aries' right arm reached out to remove the chain-rifle hanging from the underwing hardpoint, bringing it up in standard firing position. The integrated targeting sensors connected with the cockpit, displaying a targeting reticle that automatically centered on the fleeing enemy, which just happened to be a high-performance motorcycle. The targeting sensors functioned almost exactly the same as the 'aim assist' function in video games.

Adjusting more controls, Kanako manually shifted her weapon's aim to just ahead of and to the right of the motorcycle. Immediately, the AI informed her, _"Lieutenant, your targeting is off. You will not strike the target in this manner."_

"I know," she answered. "I'm giving him a wake-up call."

She depressed the trigger under her right thumb. Immediately, a spray of 125mm rounds chewed up the pavement to the motorcycle's right. The driver's reaction was remarkable; he'd been moving out of the path of the shots as soon as he'd heard the report of the Mobile Suit's weapon. Kanako allowed her targeting sensors to reacquire a true lock; she'd not need to fire again.

Ahead, a security checkpoint, separating the city-base from the city proper, loomed before them. Kanako watched as the motorcycle slammed right through it, losing neither speed nor stability; the motorcycle had to be customized. A shame she'd probably end up having to ruin such a nice machine.

She reached forward and tapped a button on her communications console, activating the external speakers. "That was your warning shot," she called to the motorcycle driver. "Stop your vehicle now and surrender."

Her console chimed gently, then she heard a report from the two Aries that were being sent to support her. _"Lieutenant Kanako, Intelligence suspects the enemy may have a Gundam for support. We'll be deploying with the space laser."_

She grimaced. The space laser was an incredibly-destructive weapon, the modern equivalent of a fifteen-kiloton nuclear device. She'd also once played an old video game, a first-person shooter played from the perspective of a green-armored supersoldier defending the planet against an alien conglomeration. One of the weapons in the game had been a portable laser device that could destroy any vehicle and kill any opponent with a single shot. Yeah, that pretty much summed up the space laser.

She did not think that weapon was practical for use in-atmosphere. But it may have been the only one with the power to damage a Mobile Suit made out of Gundanium. "Understood," she answered, after disengaging her external speakers. "Be careful of the heat potential. Don't fully-charge the space laser before firing."

"_Yes, ma'am."_

The enemy was almost to the forest. Kanako tensed slightly, expecting an ambush at any time. "I'll draw them out a little..." She manually adjusted the aim of her chain-rifle, setting it slightly closer to the motorcycle this time.

"_Lieutenant..."_ her AI began.

"I'm aware of the poor firing solution," she interrupted. "We want to take him alive."

She fired the chain rifle. No amount of driver talent would have prevented the subsequent loss of control resulting from the explosive impact of the bullets slamming into the ground less than five feet away from the motorcycle. The vehicle's front tire fell into a newly-created pothole, sending the motorcycle flipping up and forward, flinging the rider forward twenty meters along his previous travel path.

Circling the downed driver slowly, Kanako had to assume that the driver had been killed by that impact. Had she known that the driver was Motoko, a highly-ranked practitioner of Shinmeiryu, she would have known that she managed to manipulate the flow of ki through her body to prevent serious injury from occurring on landing. Not knowing that, Kanako was stunned when the driver of the motorcycle stood slowly, turning to face her landing Mobile Suit.

The driver's helmet had been damaged in her tumble along the ground. It looked to be a custom job, and expensive. Basing from the standard black helmet, it had been airbrushed to appear a misty dark blue, with a pair of dark silver angel wings on the back of the helmet, and an indigo Eastern-style dragon curling around the helmet. The rider pulled off and tossed aside the helmet, allowing a thick ponytail of long black hair to come tumbling down, before she raised her hands in a gesture of surrender. Even through the distance, it was obviously a mocking gesture.

Kanako rocked back slightly in her seat. "A girl?" she mumbled, perplexed. Even though she, herself, as a female Mobile Suit pilot proved the ability and prowess of women in combat, it still came as a surprise to her when she encountered others on the battlefield. "And not much younger than me, if at all. She did all this to the base on her own?"

There was a slight shift in the girl's posture, and then suddenly the satchel that had landed at her feet was up in the air, having been flung upward by the girl. Kanako caught a flicker of motion from the girl, then the satchel exploded as a number of flash devices within it went off, blinding Kanako and her sensors long enough for the girl to retrieve her motorcycle and tear into the forest. Snarling, Kanako fed power to her engines and rose over the forest, tuning her sensors to the trees below.

"No support troops," she mused to herself. "She attacked the base by herself, but she seems to be about my age... I wonder what..."

"_Lieutenant, unknown contact at seven o'clock low. Target does not appear on radar, infrared profile suggests Mobile Suit of unknown classification."_

"That'll be her, and her Gundam," Kanako said, swinging her Aries up on its left engine block and swinging around in a bone-crushing high-_g_ turn that no other Aries could match. The sight that awaited her as she came around gave her momentary pause. Standing up out of the forest, the Mobile Suit stood slightly taller than the average Leo, its armor colored in whites, reds, blues, and yellows. Unlike Alliance Mobile Suits, which gave no thought to anything other than functionality, the Mobile Suit turning to stare her down looked downright fearsome.

She didn't notice the activity behind the Gundam, the arrival of her two support Aries, carrying the massive space laser between them. The Gundam also appeared to take no notice of it, but this was not the case. The emitter of the beam weapon began to glow an angry red as the Aries pilots locked onto the back of the Gundam.

"_Lieutenant, Kaunan 9 and Kaunan 12 have locked onto the target,"_ her AI reported.

"Fire!" Kanako ordered, throwing her Mobile Suit into a sideslip to take herself out of the path of the beam, should it overpenetrate the Gundam.

"_Huh, surprising,"_ the voice of the pilot broke in over an unencrypted broadcast. _"I didn't think you'd have it in you to fire."_

The Gundam moved faster than the charging capacitors of the space laser. Drawing the full-metal katana from the sheath at its hip, the Gundam overboosted its vernier engines, the resulting blinding wash of heat energy obliterating a large swath of the forest. The boost of speed that followed rocketed the Gundam from its position over a hundred meters distant from the pair of Aries directly to them in two seconds flat, but it also held the distinct drawback of completely burning out the engines. They'd need to be replaced after that stunt.

Regardless, the move was stunningly-brilliant, and not a small amount embellished as well. With a graceful smoothness that belied the fact that a Mobile Suit was little more than a machine, the Gundam swept its katana across in an arcing blow, cleanly severing the top halves of both units in that single strike, leaving the space laser undamaged and falling to the forest floor as the two Mobile Suits detonated, the roaring conflagration doing even further damage to the forest.

Kanako cursed loudly; she _knew_ that the other pilots would be useless in battle against a Gundam. She assumed that its booster would be fried after that explosive overboost, so she hovered out of the Mobile Suit's range of both blade and that flexible extender in place of its right arm, firing her chain rifle toward its head. Knowing that she couldn't harm the Gundam itself, she was hoping that she could destroy its sensors, allowing her to sweep in and claim the space laser, possibly the only weapon on the field that could damage it.

The Gundam had other plans. Turning the katana in its hands, it settled into a stance normally seen by practitioners of kendo, that with its weight leaned forward on its right leg, the blade held down and behind it on the left side. Anticipating that the Mobile Suit had some way of reaching her, even with her being out of melee range, Kanako threw her Mobile Suit to the side.

Not a moment too soon, either. The Gundam struck forward and out with its blade, and against all laws of physics that she knew of, a cylindrical blast of wind and cherry blossom petals appeared from the apex of the blade's swing, roaring out on what would have been a collision course with her own Aries. As it was, the wind tunnel, evidently sporting a razor's edge, sheared the left engine block off of her Mobile Suit, the resultant flat spin sending her into a painful crash down into the forest below.

---

The south hangar area of the base was a frenzied hive of frantic activity as transport pilots rushed to complete their pre-flight checks, loadmasters worked to finish loading the Taurus prototypes onto the massive transport planes, and security personnel maintained a steady vigil, while listening to the sounds of battle out in the forests.

"We have to hurry it up!" the senior non-commissioned officer in charge of the loading process shouted. "Pilot, lift off as soon as we've got the sixth Taurus loaded."

Standing on top of the overseer's platform with the NCO, Uranami peered out over the frantic hive of activity, shaking his head. _What fools are they,_ he thought to himself, _concerning themselves that the enemy will come here and destroy their precious Mobile Suits, when they, themselves, have given him the means to destroy them safely and comfortably from where he is._

Removing a communicator from a pouch on his belt, he contacted Shirai in the cockpit of his shuttle. The blue-painted craft was currently parked in a way that it blocked one of the transports from leaving the hangar. "Shirai, keep the shuttle where it is. Do not remove it from its current position."

"_Sir?"_

"These mice scurry about to get the Taurus out now, not realizing that they've handed a close-range Mobile Suit an exceptionally long-ranged weapon. Any of these aircraft leaving the base will be destroyed by that space laser."

"_Lieutenant, you're putting a lot of stock in the ability of the enemy craft."_

"A little, yes, but I'm also putting a lack of faith in the sensibilities of these officers and the capabilities of the two pilots they sent out to assist Kanako." He paused for a moment, worried that even Kanako's agility and skill in Mobile Suit combat may not save her. However, he'd not received a report concerning her destruction. "We witnessed our own enemy obliterate two Aries with a single beam cannon, and then the destruction that this particular unit caused at the Indus base. No, these soldiers have sealed their own fate."

"_Understood, Lieutenant. We'll keep the shuttle parked right here."_

"Lieutenant Uranami," the NCO said, turning back to face him. "You need to move your shuttle. That transport is fully loaded and can depart now."

"No."

"Pardon me, Lieutenant?" the NCO queried, an edge appearing in his voice.

"The enemy will not come here," Uranami answered, the calmness in his own voice only serving to further anger the NCO. "So don't move the Taurus prototypes."

For a moment, the NCO appeared to debate striking the taller man. Then he let out a wordless noise of exasperation, turned away, and slammed his palm down on his control panel. "Forget it. Quox Two, you're cleared to taxi. Get those Mobile Suits out of here."

With a flash of its running lights serving as acknowledgment, the second transport aircraft closed its loading bays and rolled out of the hangar. As it did so, the NCO turned back to Uranami with a growl. "Lieutenant, I could have you court-martialed!"

It took a lot of effort on Uranami's part not to smirk as he moved to stand beside the NCO, looking out over the tarmac and waiting to see if his prediction would come true. "I am far more composed than you right now," he answered. "If one makes a decision with a cool head, they will not come to find themselves later regretting that decision, wouldn't you say?"

As the large, bulky transport rumbled down the runway and up into the night sky, neither man said anything. For a moment, it appeared as though Uranami would be proven wrong, that the Taurus would escape safely. If that were the case, he would merely chalk it up as a lesson learned, accept his punishment humbly, and move on.

Then a brilliant red-orange beam of energy struck out of the forest, piercing the side of the transport craft in the exact center and overpenetrating through to the other side. The stricken transport immediately detonated in a ball of fire, raining flaming debris down over the base.

Despite the situation, Uranami felt the strong and sudden urge to smile. He swiftly suppressed it.

---

Out in the forest, Kanako watched helplessly as the Gundam nonchalantly tossed away the sparking, ruined hulk of metal that had been the space laser. The pilot had charged the space laser up to its complete and full capacity, and the resulting backlash of heat had melted the cannon. Were the Mobile Suit not made of Gundanium alloy, it too would likely have been destroyed. For a moment, the Gundam regarded the hand-like manipulators that it had held the space laser with, seeming to inspect minor burn damage. Then, it turned toward Kanako.

"_Are you conscious, woman?"_ the pilot's voice sneered at her. _"Are you listening? Once I realized you were a woman, I had thought that you would lose your stomach for combat against me, knowing my age and gender. But you didn't, and I respect that. Furthermore, you kept your head about you in battle. I respect that. Because of that respect, you live to see tomorrow, and I'll leave the rest of your precious Mobile Suits intact."_ The Gundam turned and began to stride away from the battlefield; its only option, given that it had burned out its thrusters earlier. After a few steps, it paused and turned back slightly. _"It is my sincere wish that the next time we meet, you will be piloting a more capable Mobile Suit, or I will be piloting a less capable one. I am curious how a contest between us would turn out on equal footing."_

With her Mobile Suit's fusion reactor locked in a standby mode to prevent catastrophic failure due to the damage it had sustained, Kanako had no choice but to watch the enemy machine walk away, leaving her cursing colorfully in no less than seven languages.

---

According to most geological surveys, the Pacific Ocean contained over twenty-five thousand islands, not including partially-submerged islands. Consequently, it would not be difficult by any stretch of imagination for an organization or group to purchase a decent-sized island, and then have that island disappear from all major maps. With sufficient money paid to ensure that no attention was focused on the recently-vanished island, any number of clandestine activities might go on.

It was on just one such 'invisible island' that the Gundams of Naru and Kitsune had been brought for repairs and rearmaments. Naru, no stranger to paramilitary organizations, had realized rather quickly that the island and its facilities were not catered solely to the needs of Kitsune's Mobile Suit. The men and women she saw were uniformed, though in the more practical uniforms of the older military services from before the time of the colonies, not the overly-theatrical uniforms worn by the Alliance and OZ. There was more going on at the island than met the eye.

Even so, early evening found the two Gundams laid prone in the primary maintenance building. A crew of technicians swarmed over Kitsune's Gundam, working with sophisticated diagnostics manipulator arms and a bevy of replacement parts. By contrast, Naru's Gundam was all but unattended, seen to only by the pilot herself, her all-purpose laptop connected to the main computer system of the Mobile Suit and running diagnostic scans.

"Insulation in section twenty-six hundred," she murmured to herself, again bringing forward that habit of vocalizing her way through problems. "I think I can fix it..."

A short distance away, Kitsune turned from her own Gundam's repair work and crossed the few feet to her new comrade's Mobile Suit. "Hey, Naru, you know you don't have to do it all yourself, right?" she asked. "I mean, we got plenty of repair parts, and the mechanics here are experienced with MS and they won't have any problems with fixing yours up, too."

"No," Naru answered curtly and swiftly, paging through repair screens.

"Why not?" Kitsune asked, climbing up and sitting on the white-painted section of the Gundam that served as its waistline.

"Trust issues," the brunette said, not taking her eyes off the screen. "This island is a military base, these people are a paramilitary force of some kind. Neither you nor they have seen fit to inform me of the nature of this force, which implies a lack of trust directed at me. I am simply returning that lack of trust by not allowing anyone the opportunity to come into contact with the sensitive parts of my Mobile Suit."

"You've got pretty much the same damn design on yours as I got on mine!" Kitsune snapped back, shaking a fist at the other pilot. "There won't be much they'd see working on yours that they wouldn't on mine!"

"The point stands."

Kitsune shook her head. "Fine, but you still need the parts. You can't fix your machine if you don't have the replacement parts. Not like you can with your arm, you know what I mean?"

Opening her mouth to fire off a particularly-scathing remark to the perpetually-squinting pilot, Naru stopped as she heard the distinctive chiming coming from her cockpit that indicated a priority mission communication. Setting her diagnostic laptop down, she dropped down into the cockpit and pulled the main viewscreen over into its place, keying up the text and data communication.

Kitsune, likewise hearing the noise, scrambled up from her perch and leaned her head over the lip of the cockpit, calling down, "Somethin' up?"

Naru shrugged slightly, scanning the information. "Nothing important, just a mission. There's an OZ transport convoy carrying Gundanium alloy for use in new Mobile Suit research." She downloaded the pertinent data, then terminated the transmission. "I'll handle it in the morning."

"In the morning?" There was no covering Kitsune's shock or exasperation. "You can't do anything with your machine in this shape. We're talkin' serious miracles here."

"For you, maybe," Naru replied, fighting a strong urge to smile. She was already formulating her plan. "I, on the other hand, can handle it."

"Oh?" the fox-eyed woman was not pleased, and made no effort to hide her disgust. "Well, _excuse_ me for being a mere _mortal_." With that, she turned and jumped from Naru's reclined Mobile Suit to the hangar floor. As she landed, she spared a glance over her shoulder at the more-colorful Gundam. _You screw up out there and you're toast. Your missions are just as no-error as mine are. What's going on here?_

The early evening faded on into the night. As the hours passed and the work on Kitsune's Gundam was completed, many of the mechanics had again offered their services to Naru, and then turned in for the night upon her terse refusals. Drawn by the sound of an arc welder, Kitsune staggered out of the attached barracks to find Naru working tirelessly on her Mobile Suit, currently replacing water-damaged joint material in her machine's right knee.

"Man, talk about dedicated," she muttered, smothering a yawn. "I'm out of here."

---

It wasn't a hero's welcome that awaited Kanako on the tarmac as two standard Aries deposited her damaged unit. The only figure that stood awaiting her was Uranami, who approached the machine as soon as it had settled, keying open the cockpit hatch and rising up on the pilot winch. Peering into the darkened interior of the cockpit, he called out, "Are you alright in there, Kanako?"

"Yeah," she answered quietly, her voice cracking from the dryness in her throat. "Just feeling abused inside and out."

Stepping off of the pilot winch, Uranami knelt on the hatch and looked inside at her. "I'm grateful that you're alive, Kanako." His voice said more than his words did.

She scoffed and tossed her headset onto the consoles carelessly. "You only say that because they'd give me a two-step promotion if I'd gotten killed."

He smirked. "With that sense of humor, you've nothing to worry about."

"I want to help you," she said suddenly, looking up, her usual spirit and determination beginning to burn again. That enemy pilot had slighted her, and she would see that injustice paid back. "I need to become stronger."

Uranami smiled knowingly. "I know. I've been through hell against Gundam myself. But the next time I see _them_, they won't get off so easily." Kanako's predatory grin amused him, and struck him with a touch of nostalgia. "I'd be honored to have your help, but it seems that it will take some time for my new machine to be ready. Perhaps a short leave period is in order."

The pilot instructor raised her eyebrow. "Oh? And where would you go?"

He smiled. "I think I know just the place."

---

Early the next morning saw Naru cruising high in the atmosphere, her fully-repaired Gundam in its flight mode, closing in on the OZ transport craft. Inside the cockpit, she checked her targeting sensors, then nodded, noted for the mission recorder, "Target confirmed," and manipulated the proper levers to deploy the Mobile Suit mode.

As she raised her buster rifle and the targeting sensors began to beep rapidly as they sought a lock, Naru took notice of the fact that the enemy transport had not begun evasive maneuvers, had not even appeared to notice her. Once more, she was thankful for Gundanium's radar-absorbing properties.

Once the targeting reticule turned red to indicate a solid lock, she wasted no time in depressing the trigger beneath her right thumb. A thick, ionized beam of golden, destructive energy roared out of the barrel of the buster rifle, traversing the distance almost instantly and flash-incinerating the rear half of the transport. Chain reactions ripped through the transport, soon catching ablaze and incinerating the remainder of the craft.

Lowering the smoking buster rifle, Naru nodded at her handiwork, then thought back to the fox-eyed pilot of the other Gundam, who should be waking up right about then and discovering exactly how Naru had managed to pull off her little miracle. She couldn't help herself from throwing her head back and indulging in a fit of malicious laughter at the other woman's expense.

---

Back on the island, Kitsune awoke to swearing, loud and lots of it. Rolling out of the hammock she had fallen asleep in, she pulled on her boots and stumbled out of the barracks. The sight that greeted her had her falling to her knees in shock, unable to form coherent thoughts, let alone coherent words. Her Gundam had been neatly disassembled into its six major parts; head, torso, legs, and arms; critical parts and components obviously missing.

"We've been had!" one of the mechanics lamented. "She took her damn parts from this machine!"

Over the noise of the cursing mechanics, Kitsune heard the rhythmic clicking of high-heeled shoes, followed by a feminine, gentle voice that said, "Well, at the very least, the joke is on her. Our special response team already seized the load of Gundanium that her target had been carrying. The transport she's probably in the process of destroying is carrying nothing more sinister than a cargo bay full of children's toys and clothing. Of course, her destroying it conveniently covers up _our_ theft of the alloy."

Kitsune looked over toward the voice, seeing the person she'd become familiar with since reaching Earth. The young woman was young, possibly younger than her, wearing a female officer's uniform that bore naval captain's insignia and the organization's curious symbol of a winged sword superimposed over the planet Earth. Her face commanded respect and spoke of hard-earned wisdom, while still maintaining its youthful beauty, and her long hair was pulled into a braid that she draped over her right shoulder. Kitsune still couldn't tell exactly what color the girl's hair was; something darker than platinum blonde, but it couldn't be described as silver or gray.

"So, Miss Konno, have you considered our request to join us as a full-time operative?" she asked, smiling gently.

The fox woman found herself grinning, more at the young woman having described the bait-and-switch operation. "I much prefer bein' called Kitsune," she said. "And you know, Captain Testarossa, I think I might just accept that offer."

"Well then, Kitsune, I much prefer that my friends call me Tessa," the young woman said. "Welcome to MITHRIL."

_**To be continued...**_

---

_With the entrance of the Gundams, the true battle has begun. But is this truly what the Colonies desire? One by one, the Gundam pilots begin to gather at the Hinata dormitory. As the machinations of fate begin to draw the players together, shadowy figures have begun to play their own hand on the swirling events. Amidst it all, a fated reunion between childhood love draws ever nearer._

_Next, on New Mobile Report Shooting Stars, Episode 5: __**Edge of Heaven**__._

* * *

**A/N:** The next chapter will probably be shorter and longer in coming than this one was, because as you can see, I've totally thrown out the existing episode 5 of Gundam in favor of a completely original episode. Oh joy. Fun and shenanigans. Stay tuned, folks.


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